Spa-Sofia-Liège: A motoring adventure

Fifty years ago this week I set off from Spa in Belgium to report the last Spa-Sofia-Liège Rally. The Marathon de la Route was organised by the Royal Motor Union of Liège, whose M Garot enjoyed his reputation for organising the toughest rally in the world. Started in 1931 as the Liège-Rome-Liège, it had been to various turning points, settling in 1964 on Bulgaria then well behind the Iron Curtain. Only a handful of cars ever made it to the finish.

I set off from Spa in pursuit. The Motor sent junior staff on important assignments safe in the knowledge that they were accompanied by veteran photographers. They, like George Moore who came with me, had done it all before. We could pitch up at a Yugoslav B&B; George would know the language, how much we’d be charged and probably the proprietor’s name. He introduced me to drivers, team managers, other journalists and helped me across the tripwires of providing a true and accurate account, without frightening the horses.

You would be meeting them again on the RAC and then the Monte as well as next year’s Alpine. They seemed to run out of Presse plates so I ran as an Officiel.

A Ford Corsair GT was unlikely as a means of keeping up with works Austin-Healey 3000s and 1962 European Rally Champion Eugen Böhringer, but it was the only car spare. It could manage 95mph on a good day and reach 60 inside 13sec. In the interests of science I made the brakes fade on the downside of an alp; I had heard about brake fade but never really experienced it so when George dozed off I got the brake fluid boiling. The 9in front discs (there were drums at the back) were probably aglow. I left off before it got dangerous.

We kept up with the rally for 3,000 miles. George knew the shortcuts when it dashed off into the mountains. Memorably this was the event on which Logan Morrison and Johnstone Syer, whom I knew from Scottish rallies, retired their works Rover 2000 when Blomquist’s Volks-wagen overturned. The driver was unconscious and nobody, not even a VW team-mate, had stopped so Logan's opportunity for glory was lost.

This was also the rally on which BMC competitions manager Stuart Turner could not conceal his delight. He had not only scored the second win with a big Healey but also “We broke the sound barrier - we got a Mini to the finish of the Liège.”

Title of the report? The Beatles had just made “A Hard Day’s Night.” Aaltonen’s car (below left) was sold by Bonhams in 2005 for £100,500. I drove another works car in 1966, reporting on it in Safety Fast magazine and again in

Sports Car Classics Vol 1.

Amazon £3.08. After a number of countries decided rallies at such speeds dangerous, they refused the Royal Motor Union permission to continue it. The Marathon de la Route became a track event on the Nürburgring. The Liège-Rome-Liège reappeared only as a touring classic.

The Motor, week ending September 5 1964

A hard (four) days’ night. Austin-Healey win an even faster Spa-Sofia-Liège rally. Report by Eric Dymock pictures by George Moore.

“The Liège has been getting slack; there were twenty five finishers last year and eighteen the year before.” In 1961 there were eight, thirteen in 1960 and fourteen the year before that. M. Garot wants it back to about eight and this year he very nearly got his wish until an alteration in plans put several cars back into the running. But he tried.

After the finish, John Sprinzel said, “This year we did about a day and a half's route in a day.” The pace was much, much hotter with average speeds of 50 and 60 mph over rough, rocky roads where such a schedule is just not possible. The 1964 Spa-Sofia-Liège was run in hot weather over roads little rougher than before but at a cracking, damaging pace for four days and nights of the most intensive high-speed motoring in the world.

RaunoAaltonen, the Finnish speedboat racer and Tony Ambrose, Hampshire shopkeeper, won with a works Austin-Healey 3000. Saabs driven by Erik Carlsson and Pat Moss-Carlsson were second and fourth, and Eugene Böhringer took third place in a 230SL Mercedes-Benz after two successive wins in 1962 and 1963. For finishing in three consecutive years, Böhringer wins a Gold Cup in company, this year, with Paul Colteloni (Citroën), Francis Charlier (Volvo) and Bill Bengry (Rover two years, now Sunbeam).

Citroën were the only manufacturer with a team left intact (they had entered three) and none of the club teams finished with more than two runners. Forty-two tired, dusty people steered twenty-one tired, dusty, battered motor¬cars into the finish on Saturday, survivors of the hundred or so gleaming machines which left Belgium late the previous Tuesday. Three Alfa Romeos were entered; none finished. Thirteen Citroëns were entered; only four sighed and wheezed into the last control. Out of eighteen Fords only three survived and the entire Triumph, Renault and Rover teams were. wiped out. Volks¬wagens, usually stayers on rough courses, started with seven, finished with one; even the might of Mercedes was reduced from five to two, although two more struggled on till the very last night.

The scrutineering on Tuesday morning was a leisurely affair, and nothing caused much trouble. As last year, there was some carping over lights, the officials preferring paired spot lamps and reversing lights worked by the gear 1ever and not a switch. So while they appeared not to notice Perspex windows and plastic body panels, they banned an odd fog light. Drivers solemnly removed the bulbs, the officials daubed paint here and there, stamped the car and it was over -¬ except for the replacement of the bulbs just down the road. All very casual. One British team chief wryly remarked “You could drive up here in a supercharged plastic van and they'd pass it”.

The cars were despatched from Liège on Tuesday evening (with the exception of eight non-starters including Trautmann (Lancia) and Feret’s Renault) in quick, three-minute batches of three to spend the night on the Autobahn through Germany, arriving just after first light at Neu Ulm, beyond Stuttgart. The section was neutralized for time, but it was here that Rover's misfortunes began. Anne Hall handed over the 2000 to co-driver Denise McCluggage who, while Anne slept, wrong-slotted down the Stuttgart Auto¬bahn and went 100 kilometres before she realized her mistake. The hour’s lateness guillotine swept down on the Rover before the event was properly under way.

Through Austria, and into northern Italy over the Passo di Resia to the Passo di Xomo, the rally began in earnest. High average speeds were imposed over the dusty, narrow roads, which climbed close to the peaks in everlasting hairpin bends. And the retirements began. The Boyd/Crawford Humber went out before the Alps, so did the Michael Nesbitt/Sheila Aldersmith Mini-Cooper, at Lindau with a broken fan pulley. High in the Alps, at Tresche-Conca the pace and the sun were both hot and tourists coming the other way, through the control at Enego were picking their .way carefully. But enthusiastic Italian policemen waved the rally cars through villages and the popu¬lation joined in urging the drivers to greater things. If the rally was momentarily unpopular with other cars actually on the road, bystanders in those high-altitude villages loved it.

(Below: My 1966 works car on test)

By Villa Dont, just before the Yugoslav border, the WiIlcox-Smith Saab retired, the Xomo had claimed an Italian-entered Maserati, and some really punishing sections began. By the time the rally had entered Yugoslavia and passed through Bled, Col and Carrefour Ogulin in the early hours of Thursday morning the pace was telling very seriously. Ford's troubles began with the Richards/David Cortina going out, followed by the Ray/Hatchett Cortina. The Martin Hurst/Bateman Rover 3-litre retired after a stone damaged the fan, which disintegrated through the radiator. The car lost its water and that was that. The Belgian Harris/Gaban Lancia Flaminia, de Lageneste/du Genestou in their works Citroën, the Wilson/Smith Renault, and the Slotemaker/Gorris Daf, were among the 25 cars this 150-mile stretch of rocky, dusty road claimed. Timo Makinen had persistent tyre trouble; six punctures in quick succession losing him so much time he had to retire and another works Citroën went out with clutch trouble. Both American Ford Mustangs retired on this stretch, one overturned.

Novi, on the coast, Zagreb and the autoput to Belgrade then took their toll. The weather remained hot, wearing out tyres and brakes fast, as well as the drivers. The high speeds on the autoput overheated the gearboxes on the heavily undershielded works M.G. Bs of Pauline Mayman/Valerie Domleo and Julian Vernaeve/David Hiam; both broke before Belgrade. The Clark/Culcheth Rover 2000 stopped with engine trouble and the Marang/”Ponti” works Citroën retired. Many, many cars were now running very late and just before the Bulgarian border the organizers intro¬duced a change of route. This added a loop of fairly easy road about 90 kilo¬metres long, with which went a two-hour time allowance. Whether M. Garot did this to give the drivers some breathing space or not, this was in effect what happened and probably more cars reached the finish as a result. Certainly, the original route was passable (some used it) and service crews at Sofia, the turning point, were glad of the extra few minutes to restore the battered cars to something nearer rallyworthiness.

But Bulgaria claimed its victims too. Renault lost two R8s and Austin-Healey the Paddy Hopkirk/Henry Liddon car, which broke down also with gearbox trouble. Honda, after their tragic Liège last year, had entered one car with a Belgian/Japanese crew, but it, too retired when it was hit by a lorry. The Seigle-Morris/Nash Ford Corsair went out at Sofia and so did one of the big rear-engined Czechoslovac Tatras.

The survivors now attacked one of the roughest parts of the entire rally. Back into Yugoslavia through Kursumlija to Titograd and Stolac. The King/Marlow Ford Cortina (a private entry which usually gets further than most) went out near Titograd after the electrics failed and the car had to be push started at every control. A puncture when the time allowance was running out was the final blow. The Sprinzel/Donnegan Cortina's front suspension was getting tattered by now and needed frequent attention. Help was recruited from the most unlikely sources to weld and rebuild for a harrowing but apparently hilarious limp to the finish.

The Taylor/Melia works Cortina finished, its rally on the same road, or rather off the same road too badly damaged to continue. SimiIarly the Elford/Stone works Cortina crashed with its wheeIs in the air and the James/ Hughes Rover 3-litre stopped against the rocks, thus sacrificing two gold cups. All the accidents were without serious injury to the drivers.

The Gendebien/Demortier Citroën re¬tired less spectacularly but just as effectively with distributor trouble, then it was the turn of the works Triumph 2000s to fail. They had been going very strongly indeed up to Stolac and Split on the return through Yugoslavia, especially the Terry Hunter/Geoff Mabbs car. The Fidler/Grimshaw and the Thuner/Gretener cars went out first, then the third at Split, all within a short dis¬tance of one another with the rear suspension breaking loose. Logan Morrison/Johnstone Syer retired their works Rover 2000 when they went to the help of the Blomquist/Nilsson Volks¬wagen which had overturned. The driver was unconscious and no other help was available (nobody else, not even a VW team-mate had stopped) so Logan's chances went with another car's acci¬dent. The last Rover (the Cuff/Baguley 3-litre) retired, running out of time after hitting a wall near Split. The Toivonen Volkswagen went out with a broken gearbox.

At Obrovac, the rally had spread itself out over many miles of road. The sur¬vivors who were motoring strongest in the intense heat were being led by the Aaltonen/Ambrose Austin-Healey and Böhringer/Kaiser Mercedes-Benz 230SL, bent now and losing oil. The two Saabs were crackling their fierce exhaust notes through the tiny Yugoslav villages watched by wondering peasants and only Ewy Rosquist looked cool at the wheel of the Mercedes-Benz 220SE she co-drove with Schiek, The long, straggling field drove up the twisty, spectacular, but well¬ surfaced coast road beside the inviting Adriatic and back into the Italian Alps for the second time and the final, gruelling night’s drive. Further casualties were few; there weren’t many cars left to drop out and those who had motored thus far were very determined indeed. A Belgian Mercedes-Benz 220SE failed at Bienno and the similar works car of Kreder and Kling at Trafoi.

The finish was almost an anti-climax. Large crowds and flowers greeted the dusty, battered, straggling cars as they creaked into Spa before the final proces¬sion to the Royal Motor Union premises in Liège itself. Past winner Pat Moss and her pert, pretty 19-year-old Swedish co¬driver Elizabeth Nystrom got a special cheer. The winning Austin-Healey looked little the worse for its ordeal and so did the Saabs. Böhringer's Mercedes had lost some front lights. The brave La Trobe/Skeffington Humber Super Snipe whose, performance had been staggering had a dented door; the big, yellow Tatra V8 which had done equally well (such big cars must have been a handful) was similarly bent. The Alan Allard/Mackies Cortina was scraped on all four corners, after an off-the-road excursion on its roof, and the Sprinzel/Donnegan Cortina limped into the finish using up so much of its time allowance that all the crowds had gone home and no one saw its bruises.

What pleased B.M.C. team manager Stuart Turner almost as much as his out¬right Austin-Healey win? “We broke the sound barrier - we got a Mini to the finish of the Liège.” The Wadsworth/Wood Morris-Cooper was, in the final pare fermé in Belgium, albeit with heavy penalties, but after some 3,100 of the world’s toughest, roughest, fastest miles.

Sex in Cars

Half Britain’s male drivers apparently have sex in cars with a third of the female. Confused.com has done a survey. Either a lot of male drivers are sharing or they’re fantasising. I am more inclined to believe another bit of poll that says nearly 55 per cent of men and 57 per cent of women argue in the car.

Wales is sexier. Fifty two per cent of drivers there do it in cars but in London it’s only 35 per cent. What’s wrong? Street lights? Traffic wardens? The survey uncovered more guilty secrets. Passengers partying in the back – 15 per cent of men and 9 per cent of women allow it. Not sure about “partying”. More than drinking and singing lewd songs surely. Racing away at the lights – 21 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women drivers do that.

Dumping boyfriend/girlfriend in the car – 10 per cent of women and 12 per cent of men broke up behind the wheel. It doesn’t say whether this was included among the arguers. Flirting with another driver sounds like more male fantasising and does not reveal how the flirting ended up. Some 22 per cent of men and 15 of women claim to have tried to attract other drivers on the road. Traffic jams where you can catch an eye perhaps. Must be more than a passing fancy.

Surprisingly 64 per cent of men and 71 of women eat snacks in the car.

Women voted Audi drivers the sexiest (21%) but, better news, BMW drivers were second (19%), followed jointly by Mercedes and Porsche drivers (6%). Men find women sexiest when they drive a Mini (19%) followed by Audi drivers (12%) and BMWs (10%).


Picture of my BMW in sylvan setting below. Other pictures - Mini publicity of the 1960s.

Gareth Kloet, Head of Car Insurance at Confused.com said:
"The results of this demonstrate that we truly are a nation of car lovers in every sense of the word.
"The number of men and women who tell us they have had sex in their cars has increased since last year's poll*: 37% of women (compared with 30% last year) and 50% of men (compared with 48% last year). Male Audi drivers are on top for the second year running, as voted for by female drivers. The men chose female Mini drivers as the sexiest on the road: overtaking Audi who came top last year."

To compare with last's year's results please see confused.com.

Mini - Missed The Boat at 30

Instead of selling on its virtue, the Mini was sold on price, so it never generated the money it deserved. It never brought in enough to finance its development and replacement, and Leonard Lord and his colleagues set off the disastrous train of events that led to the collapse of British Leyland and virtually the entire British motor industry. The car that should have sold at a premium gave rise instead to the motor industry aphorism that Mini cars make mini profits.
Prescient or what? That was from The Sunday Times of 27 August, 1989 amidst a welter of nostalgia surrounding the Mini's 30th birthday that only showed what a flop the car really was. Instead of celebrating 30 years leading the world in small car design, we were gazing wistfully at an antique, a car that was a pioneering starting-point, and never should have continued in production for three decades virtually unchanged. Over the same time-span, practically every component of the Volkswagen Beetle was altered. Only the brilliant original concept remained; details were amended and refined continuously.

It was not until BMW inherited the Mini’s principles and sold it at a premium price that it became a success. The first Mini had charm. When I drove one in 1959 I was amazed. (Above; the first Mini made at Cowley, 8 May 1959) No small car had ever been like this. Back to The Sunday Times of 30 years later:

The Mini's catalogue of failure leaves us with a car 30 years out of date in style, merit, and profitability. It was badly made and wrongly priced at the start, never earned enough money to keep its lead, and remains a monument to a management that never realised how distinguished it was.

(1963 Super de luxe Mini - with extra bumper bits)
There is scant cause to celebrate one of the greatest missed opportunities in automotive history, or praise a car that is slow, noisy, less safe than it ought to be, and dying on its feet save for a shrinking number of customers.

Like steam buffs hankering after the Flying Scotsman, they are out of touch with the real world. Fast, lively, well-made and reliable cars overtook the Mini almost as soon as it had shown, before the end of the 1950s, how small cars would be designed for the rest of the century and beyond.

The origins of the Mini are well-known. Sir Alec Issigonis (above), a gifted freehand artist of a designer who knew from his own experience of lightweight hill-climb specials how a good car ought to feel and handle, first drew up the Morris Minor. It was a bit radical for the old guard of motor industry grandees, but they took a risk and made it.

(Above: Issy's sketch-pad. He drew one on a table-cloth for me. Stupidly I never kept it)
They did not make it as Issigonis wanted to make it; they used an old pre-war side-valve engine, so it was never exactly nimble, but they gave "Issy" as he was known, his head in other areas such as the body shell and the torsion-bar suspension, - very avant-garde for 1948. The Minor was an instant favourite, and the later Minor 1000 remains a sought-after car to this day.

(Minis won the Monte. Issigonis was as astonished as anybody)
The Mini-Minor as it was known at first, was more radical still. Front wheel drive remained a novelty in the Fifties. Citroën used it, but they were considered very eccentric by the bluff Yorkshireman who ran the British Motor Corporation (BMC), Leonard (later Sir Leonard) Lord.

The transverse engine (above) was even more unorthodox. A couple of brave pioneers had tried it in the cold dawn of motoring, but no serious designer had entertained it as a means of squeezing the mechanical parts of a car into as small a compass as possible, to leave more room for the occupants.

Yet Lord acknowledged that the recipe, together with small wheels and rubber springs developed with the help of Issy's friend Alex Moulton from Bradford-on-Avon, had merit. He signed the Mini off for production, and it was launched upon a startled world on 26 August 1959.

Lord was only interested in competing with Ford, so the Mini was priced against Ford's cheapest car, the Popular. The fact that its technology was of the Sixties, while the Ford's origins lay well back in the Thirties was beside the point. The Mini's price was £496 against the Popular's £419.

It ought to have been £100 dearer on account not only of its novelty, but also for its interior spaciousness (see above), and its splendid handling, which enabled it to run rings round everything else on the road. It was quick, chic, economical, roomy, and took the market by storm.

It leaked of course. Early Mini carpets quickly became sodden because the seams in the welded floor faced the wrong way, scooping up rain water as the car went along. The gearbox and cooling systems were continual sources of trouble. But there were no fundamental shortcomings except perhaps mixing the gearbox oil and the engine oil in the same sump, giving rise to lubrication problems.

(Minis at Silverstone, 1965, somewhat demurely driven - they usually had smoke coming from the front wheels)
Rival designs quickly discarded this feature, for within a very short time Mini imitators appeared on the market. The pattern of small cars changed from rear-engined and rear drive like the VW Beetle, the Fiat 650 and the Renault 750, to front-engined and front wheel drive. Convention was stood on its head, and soon VW, Renault, Fiat, Peugeot, and the mighty General Motors and Ford would follow suit. From being thoroughly unconventional, transverse-engine, front-drive cars became the norm, not just for small cars, but for medium and large cars.

(1965 variant, the Mini Moke)
Lord and his board never realised the revolution they had wrought. They were more afraid that customers would be put off by the small wheels and the slab-sided appearance and turned-out body seams. Lacking the vision of Issigonis, they felt the Mini would only have merit if it was cheap.

The result was that they under-priced the most brilliant small car of all time. Instead of selling on its virtue, it was sold on price, so it never generated the money it deserved. It never brought in enough to finance its development and replacement, and Lord and his colleagues set off the disastrous train of events that led to the collapse of British Leyland and virtually the entire British motor industry.

(Final fling. One of a late series of Minis harking back to the Mini-skirted 1960s)
The car that should have sold at a premium gave rise instead to the motor industry aphorism that Mini cars make mini profits.

Classless, trend-setting, and sufficiently agile to give a good account of itself in all forms of motor sport from the Monte Carlo Rally to production car racing, the Mini should have been a financial as well as a technical success. It was marketed mistakenly as cheap and cheerful, instead of the clever new concept that it really was.

(BMW reinterprets the Mini. The Mayfair 50)
Mini ownership by the trendy Peter Sellars and Lord Snowdon was regarded with polite interest, instead of demonstrating that here was a car so good that price was not a critical ingredient in its choice.

In due course, the Metro was a worthy development of the Mini; few small cars make such good use of space, or offer so much of it for the money. Alas, it was late by 10 years or more, and when it did come, it still used (and still uses) the out of date Mini engine and gearbox because there was no money available for a new one.

When the replacement Metro arrives in a year or two, it will have a new engine. But now it has to hold its head above a flood of Mini rivals from Japan, Korea, and the rest of a world. They have followed where Issigonis led, but where an indifferent and lacklustre BMC feared to tread.
(And BMW succeeded. With hindsight I was being too kind to the Metro. Hopes for it were high in 1989)

Magnificent Minis

Discovering Western governments earned more from a gallon of petrol than they did, OPEC turned off the taps in the 1970s. British taxation hasn’t changed. We are now in another and more complicated oil crisis where a litre of petrol costs 42p to make. But 82p goes in fuel duty and VAT, so the imbalance remains. Prices are high and likely to remain so.
The first oil crisis was in 1956, when the Suez adventure led to bubble cars and inspired the Mini. Rumours have resurfaced about BMW going back to basics with a real mini, smaller than the premium-priced quirky, big Mini it has been making since 2001. As I speculated in The Sunday Times in 1991 this would not be easy. Well-intentioned safety laws might make it impossible, unless a great deal has been learned in the last twenty years about crash-engineering small cars.
Click to enlarge, or read original copy below

You can understand why Leonard Percy Lord (1896-1967, 1st Baron Lambury), the rough-tongued BMC executive prompted Alexander Arnold Constantine Issigonis (1906-1988) to create the shortest practical 4-seater of all time.
It is tempting to restore a Mark I Mini, not one of the later ones with wind-up windows and soft furnishings but a sliding-window one, with elbow room and huge door pockets. Even with an old engine, perhaps amended with fuel injection instead of a carburettor, it would use very little fuel. The old Mini was surely the most space-efficient car ever. BMC used to sell little wicker baskets, shaped as the vacant cavities, like the one under the rear seat in Gaydon’s cutaway. Of course early Minis were badly made; mine leaked terribly on account of the underbody seams facing the direction of travel, scooping up rainwater and soaking the carpets.

Never mind the charm, the astonishing cornering power, and the pert appearance a born-again Mini would be noisy without a lot of sound-deadening and not very quick. The driving position was truly awful. Issigonis believed it was good, keeping drivers alert and awake. Yet for sheer practicality the BMC Mini was, and remains, matchless. Four seats, generous legroom, a decent boot and large door pockets. Issy maintained one held the ingredients for perfect picnic cocktails – four bottle of gin and one of Vermouth. What more do you need?
Sunday Times 1991
Safety Laws Trap the Mini.
Well-meaning safety laws are making cars bigger than they need be and inhibiting improvements to one of Britain's best-loved cars. Rover cannot tamper with the design of the Mini, even to make it safer, without invoking rules which would reclassify it as a new model and subject to a fresh bout of crash-testing which it could not pass.
Instead, the car which provided economical transport to generations of British motorists, remains noisy unrefined and relatively expensive.
Sir Alec Issigonis's formula for the smallest car with four practical seats is as good now as it was when it came out thirty-two years ago. The Mini is ten feet long, four and a half feet tall and four and a half feet wide, on a wheelbase of exactly 80 inches. Eighty per cent of the space is given over to the occupants and their luggage, and the mechanical bits are squeezed into a compartment only two feet long.
Never was a car packaged better. The 120 inch long Mini remains the shortest realistic four seat car made; the Lancia Y10 is over a foot longer, the Metro more than a foot and a half, while the most recent Japanese city car the Mazda 121 is a giant of 150 inches.
The Mini already meets emission control laws and thanks to astute work by Rover technicians, fuel injection will be announced in October for the Mini Cooper. This will allow it a catalytic converter to comply with legislation due at the end of 1992. Yet the safety regulation hurdle remains.
Every major manufacturer in the world followed Issigonis's example, adopting front wheel drive and sideways-mounted engines, with an alacrity that surprised even him. Yet the Mini was almost allowed to wither on the bough; it was neither properly developed nor commercially exploited, and although Rover still makes 40,000 a year and production recently passed 5,250,000, it is now technically in arrears. At £5,395 for the basic model, and £6,470 for the plush Mayfair, it is a poor bargain.
Four seated people take up much the same space now as they did thirty years ago and the advantages of a small easily parked car remain convincing. The small-car market must expand as pressure on road space grows and demand for fuel economy increases. Yet it remains dominated by large super-minis, many of them oriental, and none a match for the Mini in compactness.
An old motor industry aphorism that mini cars generate mini profits inhibited European manufacturers. Certainly small cars cost almost as much to make as large cars; they are not made in small factories, by small numbers of people or cheap machines, and cost much the same in materials and energy.
Yet Mini sales remain healthy enough to sustain production, even though the car has not had a development programme such as the Volkswagen Beetle enjoyed. A strong demand remains for an updated 1990s Mini which retaining the 10 x 4.5 x 4.5 packaging, would be in a unique position in the second-car market, as well as providing the same entry-level motoring that the original did in 1959.
The Volkswagen, still being produced in Mexico after a production run of over 20 million, maintains the shape and size and broad specification of the car that Hitler sanctioned sixty years ago. The rear-engined air-cooled philosophy may be the same but there is not a single interchangeable component.
A 1990s Mini would keep Issigonis's ideals intact and would not need to be altered much beyond a quieter engine. Computer-aided design, which was not available to Issigonis who briefed his draughtsmen by means of free-hand sketches, could make the Mini lighter and keep it cheap. Perhaps the turned-out body seams could be smoothed off and the rear opened up to make a hatchback. But any important alteration would spring the trap of legislation which allows Rover to go on producing the old car, but prevents it being brought it up to date.
Caption
Minis have had the roof chopped off and been made into convertibles before, but it has taken thirty two years for one to be officially approved. Only 75 of the new Mini Cabriolets will be offered for sale at £12,250. If there is sufficient demand the manufacturer, LAMM Autohaus in Germany, could make more. Once the roof is removed the body needs reinforcement under the floor to make sure it does not sag in the middle.