Gerard Welter isn't your standard car designer. None of the usual loud suits, passionate gestures or extravagant locutions from him, thank you very much.

Welter, at 63, just over a year from retirement with thinning grey hair and a dull suit, frankly looks more like the driver of your executive-service minicab, than the bloke who designed it. Ask him a question and he's similarly understated.

You'll have to do it in French, by the way, because he can't be bothered to learn English, the lingua franca of anyone on the make in the international car design game of snakes 'n' ladders.

Welter is genuinely otherwise engaged - and has been all his adult life - in designing Peugeots, and in motorsport. He's been doing the former for 35 years now.

When the young Welter joined, Peugeot had a design staff of just five. Now he heads the team of 200. He doesn't need to be too show-off about his ability, because he has results on his side.

After all, the city favourite Peugeot 206 has consistently been the hot-selling supermini, and the 205 before it. Since not one of the 5.4 million 206 buyers can have bought it for Audi-like trim quality or down-the-road silence, its success is firmly rooted in its style. And it follows that the career of the stylist is in no jeopardy at all.

Hence, he can indulge his other favourite obsession - motorsport. Welter founded his own racing team, Welter Racing, and for the past few decades a posse of his staff has joined him and his family for a few weeks' spannering holiday each summer, so their WR prototypes can go about their habitual giant-killing business at Le Mans.

Sometimes the two obsessions collide. In 2002, Welter and his people had pretty well got the 207 design sorted. So, he packed them off to the Cyprus rally, to see Gronholm, Burns and Rovanperä come in first, second and third in the flat-out-horny 206 WRC.