From Tony Cooper.....

by gumball Thu Aug 27, 2009 6:32 pm

Tony came to see us at the forum on Wednesday and said he has written an article on the mini....

Here it is .........

The MINI reaches half a century and still as popular as ever!

Tony Cooper

Small, beautiful and perfectly formed, 50 years after it first rolled off the production line the Mini remains one of the most iconic cars of all time. First demonstrated to the press in April 1959 by August of that year several thousand had been produced and today more than five million have been sold.

The car was not just a cultural icon to many but an important statement of fashion, too, with a host of stage and film celebrities rushing to have customised versions built. Peter Sellers - star of The Pink Panther and Inspector Clousseau - had one made by Hooper (Motor Services) Ltd - the Rolls-Royce coachbuilder - boasting wicker-side panelling and used in the movie, A Shot in the Dark. Ringo Starr owned a hatchback version designed by Radford Coachworks who also built a Mini de Ville for Peter Sellers’ wife, Britt Ekland, as well as a hatchback for John Lennon and a chic duo-tone model for Marianne Faithfull.

He also customised a psychedelic version that appeared in The Beatles’ iconic movie, Magical Mystery Tour. Owned by George Harrison, he had it faithfully restored and showed it off to hordes of racing fans at the 1998 Goodwood Festival of Speed. Ms Faithfull actually drove hers to the Law Courts in London’s Strand to hear Mick Jagger’s appeal of his drug conviction in 1967 while in the same year John Lennon drove his to the Apple studios after hearing of the death of Brian Epstein.

And at this year’s Goodwood Revival meeting (held over the weekend of September 18-20) there’s going to be a big turn-out of racing Minis competing in the St Mary’s Trophy, a two-part race and one of the treasured highlights of the whole event which is now in its 11th glorious year.

In the Sixties, however, there was no stopping the Mini’s fame and fortune and other celebs that found the car a ‘must-have’ accessory included the likes of Niki Lauda, Enzo Ferrari and Steve McQueen while rock singer, Marc Bolan, met his death travelling as a passenger in a purple-coloured GT crashing into a tree in Barnes in west London in 1975.

But what really grabbed the attention was the car’s innovative design and for this you can thank Sir Alec Issigonis who was responsible for designing the original distinctive two-door version, the baby of the British Motor Corporation and its successors from 1959 to 2000.

This car (the Mini Mark I) is now widely considered as an icon of the Sixties and its space-saving front-wheel-drive layout - that allowed 80 per cent of the area of the car’s floor plan to be used for passengers and luggage - influenced a generation of car designers. In many ways the car’s considered the British equivalent to its German contemporary, the VW Beetle.

In total the Mini Mark I had three major UK updates: Mark II, Clubman and Mark III. And within these models there was a series of variations including an estate car, a pick-up truck, a van and the Mini Moke - a jeep-like buggy.

Designed as project ADO15 (Austin Drawing Office project number 15), the Mini came about because of a fuel shortage and was originally marketed under the Austin and Morris names until it became a marque in its own right.

And as a result of the 1956 Suez Crisis, sales of large cars slumped and there was a boom in the market for so-called Bubble cars, which were mainly German in origin. Leonard Lord - the somewhat autocratic head of BMC - decreed that something had to be done quickly. He was reported to have said: ‘God damn these bloody awful Bubble cars. We must drive them off the road by designing a proper miniature car.’

Issigonis - working for Alvis at the time - was recruited for the job and set about his new task in 1955. He attracted a small (but formidable) team to work with him. One person was Jack Daniels (who had worked with him on the Morris Minor) and another was Chris Kingham (who had been with him at Alvis). By October 1957, they had designed and built the prototype affectionately named The Orange Box because of its colour.

Designed with sliding windows in the doors, it allowed for storage pockets to be fitted in the space where a winding-window mechanism would have normally been. Issigonis is said to have sized the resulting storage bins to take a bottle of his favourite gin - Gordons! The boot-lid was designed with the hinges at the bottom so that the car could be driven with it open to increase luggage space. On early cars the number plate was hinged so it swung down to remain visible when the boot-lid was open. This design was later discontinued as it was discovered that exhaust gases could leak into the cockpit while the boot was open.

Despite its utilitarian origins, the classic Mini shape had become so iconic that by the 1990s, Rover Group (heirs to BMC) was able to register its design as a trademark in its own right.

There’s no doubt about it that the Mini etched its place into popular culture in the 1960s and was arguably the star of the 1969 film, The Italian Job, which featured a car chase in which a gang of thieves take three Minis down staircases, through storm drains, over buildings and finally into the back of a moving bus. This film was remade in 2003 but using the new MINI.

Issigonis’ friend John Cooper - owner of the Cooper Car Company and designer and builder of Formula I and rally cars - saw the potential of the Mini for competition but Issigonis was initially reluctant at first to see his beloved creation in the role of a performance car. But after Cooper appealed to BMC, the two men collaborated to create the Mini Cooper, a nimble, economical and inexpensive car.

The Austin Mini Cooper and Morris Mini Cooper made their debut in 1961 while the Mini Cooper ‘S’ earned acclaim with Monte Carlo Rally victories in 1964, 1965 and 1967. Minis were initially placed first, second and third but in the 1966 rally they were disqualified after a controversial decision by the French judges. The disqualification related to the use of a variable-resistance headlamp-dimming circuit in place of a dual-filament lamp.

However, it was found that the Citroën DS - eventually awarded first place - had illegal white headlamps but escaped disqualification. The driver of the Citroën, Pauli Toivonen, was reluctant to accept the trophy and vowed that he would never race for Citroën again.

BMC probably received more publicity from the disqualification than they would have gained from a victory but had the Mini not been disqualified, it would have been the only car in history to be placed in the top three on the Monte Carlo for six consecutive years.

The development of the car progressed and the Mark III (introduced in November 1969) featured wind-up windows with internal-door hinges except for the van and pick-up models. The boot-lid lost the original hinged number plate and its recess shape and a large rear colour-coded lamp was fitted in its place, along with larger rear-side windows while the Mark IV (introduced in 1976) had a front rubber-mounted sub-frame with single tower bolts and the rear frame had some larger bushes introduced. Twin stalk indicators were introduced with larger foot pedals and from 1977 onward, the rear-indicator lamps had the reverse lights incorporated in them.

However, in the late 1970s, the renowned Italian company Innocenti - famous for their production of the stylish Lambretta scooters - introduced the Innocenti 90 and 120, Bertone-designed hatchbacks based on the Mini platform. Bertone also created a Mini Cooper equivalent - christened the Innocenti De Tomaso - sporting a 1275-cc engine similar to the MG Metro engine.

By this stage, the Mini was still hugely popular in Britain, but it was looking increasingly outdated in the face of newer and more practical rivals including the Ford Fiesta, Vauxhall Chevette, Chrysler Sunbeam, Volkswagen Polo and Renault 5. However, since the late 1960s, plans had been in place for a newer and more practical supermini to replace it, though the Mini was still the only car of this size built by British Leyland for the home market.

Reports of the Mini’s imminent demise surfaced again in 1980 with the launch of the Austin Mini Metro, with the word ‘mini’ in all lowercase. Although the Mini continued after the Metro’s launch, production volumes were reduced as British Leyland and its successor, Austin Rover, concentrated on the Metro as its key supermini. Indeed, 1981 was the Mini’s last year in the top ten of Britain’s top-selling cars as it came ninth while the Metro came in fifth.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s the British market enjoyed numerous ‘special editions’ of the Mini, which shifted the car from a mass-market item into a fashionable icon. It was this image that, perhaps, helped the Mini to become such a valuable asset for BMW who later bought the remnants of BMC as the Rover Group.

In 1994, under Bernd Pischetsrieder - a distant relation of Issigonis - BMW took control of the Rover Group but trading proved difficult that by March 2000 the company suffered massive losses so much so that BMW disposed of most of the companies under its command. The sell-off was completed in May that year. MG and Rover went to Phoenix - a new British consortium - and Land Rover was sold to Ford Motor Company. BMW, however, retained the Mini name and the planned new model granting Rover temporary rights to the brand and allowing it to manufacture and sell the ‘run-out’ model of the old Mini.

By April 2000, the range consisted of four versions: the Mini Classic Seven, the Mini Classic Cooper, the Mini Classic Cooper Sport and - for overseas European markets - the Mini Knightsbridge. The last Mini (a red Cooper Sport) was built on October 4, 2000 and was presented as a gift to the British Motor Industry Heritage Trust in December of that year.

After the last of the Mini production had been sold, the Mini name reverted to BMW ownership and the new BMW Mini, although technically unrelated to the old car, still retains the classic transverse four-cylinder, front-wheel-drive configuration and the iconic ‘bulldog’ stance of the original. The most popular British car ever made, thousands of them are still on the road with the remaining pre-1980s versions being firmly established as collectors’ items.