Classic rally car driving with the FT: Carlos Tavares

It's just past 3am and raining gently when Carlos Tavares pulls up at the port of Monte Carlo in a beaten-up, classic rally car. He slips his long, wiry frame out the door and begins to examine his crumpled front bumper. The chief executive of Peugeot Citroen, France's largest car company and one of Europe's leading automotive original equipment manufacturers, has just completed the Monaco historic rally in a hand-refurbished 1972 Peugeot 504 Ti - it has not survived unscathed. "I was driving too fast on an icy road," he says with a glint in his eye. "There was a photographer in the way as well."

His is not the only ramshackle vehicle in this parking lot next to the city's yacht-filled harbour. Since midnight, the place has been filling up with rally cars which, in accordance with the race rules, were all built between 1955 and 1980. Tavares is still pumped with energy after the four-day, 2,000km Rallye Monte-Carlo Historique across southern France, and wants to tell me about his broken disc brake. "We have been driving on icy roads with only three of four wheels braking," he says. "You put the wrong wheel on the ice in those conditions, and you're done. Just done."

It's hard not to see a parallel between the driving conditions and his job. For the past year, Tavares has been head of PSA Peugeot Citroen, an iconic French company that has been on the brink of financial ruin after racking up €7.2bn in losses in 2012 and 2013. The Portuguese-born, French-educated car fanatic has won the praise of the entire industry since then, pulling the once-cursed group around with a programme of cost cutting and an expansion strategy focused on China. The company still loses money but has seen dramatic improvements and is now "back in the race", he says.

It is not until the following afternoon that we get to do any racing ourselves. We meet up again after lunch and pull noisily through the streets of Monaco, the rugged car steaming around the richest 0.76 square miles on the Mediterranean, past ornate private banks and Hermes shopfronts. "I am sure the policemen wouldn't like it if they checked my studded tyres," Tavares says with a grin as he takes bends that make up part of the Monaco Grand Prix circuit.

He explains the principles of rally driving, chiefly what all the stripped-down knobs and dials do. He tells me that it is all about focus, planning, concentration and, of course, winning.

"It's mostly about winning, in fact," he says. "I'm a competitor, I like competition. It so happens that I like to compete in motorsport. It could have been tennis, it could have been soccer, it could have been basketball, whatever."

Tavares has some right to be confident: he is one of the few car executives to have won races, notably the French touring car championship and the single-seater XL Formula, also in France. He was placed 64th out of a field of about 300 in the Monte Carlo rally and is reasonably pleased because his car, which he refurbished himself over six months with a friend, had a small engine (and suffered the issue with the brakes).

Many point to his focused and competitive nature - along with his obsession with cars - as the secret behind his successes at Peugeot Citroen. He is seen as the first real "car guy" to run the company for more than a decade. He started his career in the industry by joining Renault as a test-driving engineer straight from university and spent the next 32 years working his way up the company.

With the smell of petrol flooding the car, Tavares tells me he has been racing for 33 years. When he is not racing or working, he spends his spare time building and refurbishing cars in a shed in the woods, about five minutes from his house. "I go there during the weekend with my friends and we do whatever we want. I have all my goodies from all my races, like the Monte Carlo rally plate," he says. He also collects classic cars, with a 1979 Peugeot 504 V6 Coupe, a 1976 Alpine A110 and a Porsche 912 from 1966 in his garage.

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For him, racing is about more than speed and the sound of the engine. It is also about numbers, graphs, data and shaving one more second off your time - just like he tries to shave every last bit off his business costs. He says the number crunching is one of the best aspects of driving on the track today: "We have all the computers so, as soon as you step out of the car, you can compare all of your data."

Tavares has an analytical brain and lives a structured life - no doubt useful for someone who is running France's largest carmaker and also plans to spend about 20 weekends this year racing cars around Europe. "We have a very organised life, my wife and myself . . . She takes care of all the logistics for the trips, preparing everything, the hotels, the rental cars. She also connects with my assistant from the moment I am on the move," he says.

But revving past some bewildered policemen on the corner of a side road, I sense a yearning for a bit of a release as well, for the open road, for tackling dangerous terrain, for driving a car a little too hard. For Tavares and his hyper-organised mind, driving around those icy roads with a broken brake disc was a liberating experience, one that he says is getting less and less possible in an over-regulated and safety-conscious society.

"Those experiences - I call it freedom of experience - are, unfortunately, in western societies becoming really difficult," he says. He is a risk-taker in his professional life as well: two years ago, while he was at Renault, he made the headlines when he said during an interview that he wanted the job of his then boss, Carlos Ghosn. He was promptly fired.

A few months later he was head of Peugeot, in a move that was either dumb luck or genius. "I'm somewhat of a risk-taking guy . . . it was that moment or never," he explains, without completely revealing if the whole thing was a clever plan or not.

I don't have time to push Tavares any further on this. He crosses a roundabout on to the Monaco harbour and we're back at the parking lot where he finished the race. We pull up next to a fleet of multimillionaire yachts filling the deep-water port. I notice that he doesn't even glance at the luxury boats as he steps out. Even after days of solid driving, he has eyes only for the beaten-up old cars. "We only have one life, right? So I enjoy every moment of it doing what I love."

Michael Stothard is the FT's Paris correspondent.

Photographs: Benjamin Bechet; Getty Images

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