Classic Car Mart Magazine Classic Car Mart September 2013 Edizione posteriore

A controversial one this month as we delve into the history of the new MINI – or as you’ll read, the ‘soon-tobe-old’ new MINI. As you can imagine, opinion in the CCM office was firmly split when the subject of the car was raised but as with so many aspects of the classic car world a model which arouses strong opinions usually turns out to have a genuine claim to classic status. I’ve had more than a passing involvement with the little BMW myself over the years, first as Editor of a BMW
magazine when the car was launched, when we really didn’t know whether the readers would be interested in the new car or not (as we discovered, they weren’t the slightest bit bothered) and then
later during a spell as Editor of Kelsey Publishing’s own Modern MINI magazine. The latter job involved getting down and dirty with our own project car, a very early example of the basic ‘R50’ and
after we made a few simple mods to it I was surprised just how much giant-killing performance could be extracted from it. Sound familiar? That’s pretty much what made the original Mini so popular among ’60s and ’70s boy racers and I must admit to grinning like a fool every time I took the car out for a spin. The newer MINI is an impressive car as modern hatchbacks go, but somehow it’s lost that immediate feel and it’s generally considered that the early cars do have the edge on driver appeal. The car was in fact the last all-new model to emerge from Rover, although its tortured
development process did see much of the work completed in Munich which also leaves the MG TF open to claim that title too. As you can read in this month’s twin test, the TF also majors on driver appeal even if is at the expense of refinement but our worries that it may be out of its depth in a comparison with the Elise proved to unfounded.