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Post by Big Blue on Nov 21, 2019 8:07:58 GMT
No doubting the car I loved the most before any other. Here’s a fine example.    I’ve never owned one but my mum had a cooper and a mini minor. I nearly bought one as a sixth former but that didn’t work out. |
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Nov 21, 2019 9:37:23 GMT
^ ChrisM will be in to wash that shortly.
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Post by ChrisM on Nov 21, 2019 9:57:13 GMT
There you go, all done :-)  |
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Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2019 11:51:53 GMT
RBW 640P, My mini. I learned a lot from that car. Bought from my brother for £200 back in the day after he crashed it. I sold it back to him for the same but it had been put right. He smashed it up for good while following too closely behind a dump truck in London, it stopped but the mini didn't. Endex as we used to say. Much fun in the go kart.
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Post by Roadsterstu on Nov 21, 2019 13:41:35 GMT
I went to look at a Clubman as a potential first car. It was a rusty piece of shit and I never looked at another. I should have persisted, really. I'd love a proper drive in a "real" Mini.
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Post by LandieMark on Nov 21, 2019 14:45:45 GMT
I wish I had owned one. I drove an original Austin Mini Moke in Barbados many years ago which was great fun.
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Post by Martin on Nov 21, 2019 14:52:24 GMT
The closest I’ve been is a late 80s Mini City that my girlfriend at the time bought prior to passing her test. It was fun for a short time, but I didn’t fit in it particularly well and it was a bit bouncy.
My parents had one each around the time they got married, my Dads had the full set of rally spots on the grille which he moved onto a newish Clubman when I was born. He used to use it to tow a small family caravan! He’s still got the central spotlight in the garage, which will have been moved to 4 houses since he last had a Mini.
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Post by Tim on Nov 21, 2019 14:56:48 GMT
The closest I’ve been is a late 80s Mini City that my girlfriend at the time bought prior to passing her test. It was fun for a short time, but I didn’t fit in it particularly well and it was a bit bouncy. Bob will be along shortly to complete this...... |
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Post by Martin on Nov 21, 2019 14:57:42 GMT
The closest I’ve been is a late 80s Mini City that my girlfriend at the time bought prior to passing her test. It was fun for a short time, but I didn’t fit in it particularly well and it was a bit bouncy. Bob will be along shortly to complete this...... I set it up nicely on purpose! I was going to say I left it wide open..... |
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Nov 21, 2019 14:59:35 GMT
The closest I’ve been is a late 80s Mini City that my girlfriend at the time bought prior to passing her test. It was fun for a short time, but I didn’t fit in it particularly well and it was a bit bouncy. Bob will be along shortly to complete this...... Cheers. No Mini experiences for me. It was a Mk.1 Fiesta in a deserted swimming pool car park and resulted in a police torch being shone through the window and a lot of embarrassing questions. |
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Post by Ben on Nov 21, 2019 15:12:42 GMT
My Dad had three Minis apparently. All well before I was born.
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Post by clunes on Nov 21, 2019 16:45:10 GMT
I've never driven a mini on the open road but as a very young boy I did drive one quite regularly and it was, in fact, the first ever car I drove. It belonged to my Mum originally but when she 'upgraded' to a Fiesta (A Mk1 Sandpiper no less!) she sold it to my grandfather who (with the help of 5 gang-mowers) turned it into the best 'ride-on' lawn mower a kid could ever hope to experience 
He used it for as long as I can remember - the Mini for the large back garden (ok - very large) and the Mountfield for the front |
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Post by Tim on Nov 21, 2019 17:06:23 GMT
I've never driven a mini on the open road but as a very young boy I did drive one quite regularly and it was, in fact, the first ever car I drove.
Same here - my parents had a chocolate brown Clubman estate that I was allowed to put in the garage. |
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Post by Roadrunner on Nov 21, 2019 19:51:52 GMT
I drove a few back along and they were great fun. The Mini pickup we had on the farm was great for ragging around the orchard, with handbrake turns around the trees and massive power-on understeer slides around grassy fields.
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Post by PG on Nov 21, 2019 22:00:30 GMT
I learnt to drive in a Mini Clubman Traveller (my mum's) and had lessons in a Mini 850 off what was the the British School of Motoring (BSM). A female friend's mum had a Cooper S (in green with white roof) and I got passengered in that a few times (fnar, fnar). The first Mrs PG, before we were married, had a Mini 1275 GT for about a year. It was great fun to drive, but drank oil and the early Denovo runflat tyres used to lose air overnight.
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Post by Stuntman on Nov 21, 2019 22:29:19 GMT
First car I ever drove was a Mini - on my 17th birthday.
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Post by Andy C on Nov 21, 2019 22:43:40 GMT
Mate had an original mini as his first car . Amazing thing to Chuck about ,and we even went from cov to Newcastle in it , with me in the back
His dad had a cooper at the same time, and that felt like a rocketship
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Post by Alex on Nov 22, 2019 7:24:59 GMT
Bob will be along shortly to complete this...... Cheers. No Mini experiences for me. It was a Mk.1 Fiesta in a deserted swimming pool car park and resulted in a police torch being shone through the window and a lot of embarrassing questions. They caught you reading Auto Express? My mate at college had a Mini in the same red as that. The exhaust was just a single metal pipe as he couldn’t be bothered to buy a proper system and his mate at the MoT centre turned a blind eye. You always heard it before you saw it! |
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Nov 22, 2019 8:22:10 GMT
When we were teenagers a mate in the army had a mini (tank driver by day, mini driver by night), which broke down when he visited home one Friday. A friend's dad, who was the MD of the Ever Ready factory at Tanfield Lea offered to get his fitters to repair it and we could pick it up on the Sunday morning. 3 of us rocked up to the factory on the Sunday to be let in by a security guard and shown to a huge, empty warehouse - empty but for a small blue mini and three large packing cases placed around the floorspace. You could see by the black tyre marks that the fitters had obviously repaired the car and then had a lunchtime time trial around the warehouse - so we did the same, racing the car round and round until, eventually, the security guard came back to find out what all the tyre squealing was and to throw us out.
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Post by rodge on Nov 27, 2019 5:33:28 GMT
First car I drove was my mums Mini- it was brown, had the smallest engine in it- can’t remember the size- and the licence plate was 4592Z.
Such a great car to drive.
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Post by johnc on Nov 27, 2019 7:48:01 GMT
Great memories of the original Minis. I never owned one but did some autotests and sprints in cars owned by friends and worked and tuned others. Whilst they were great fun to chuck about I think these days we would feel pretty exposed and intimidated driving in traffic. My memories were 20 mile blasts on country B roads in a car about half the width of its side of the road. Noisy and bumpy with no creature comforts.
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Post by ChrisM on Nov 27, 2019 8:28:41 GMT
A little while after my dad was promoted to working in the City of London way back in the 1960's, he bought a well-used Mini Countryman to commute to the local train station. I was far too young to drive at the time but I do recall a few journeys in that car, one being to collect some bags of "real manure" to spread on our garden from a farmyard some miles away.
I recall that there was a starter button on the floor at the base of the driver's seat, and the battery was under the rear seat base
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Post by Boxer6 on Nov 27, 2019 10:51:16 GMT
First car I drove was my mums Mini- it was brown, had the smallest engine in it- can’t remember the size- and the licence plate was 4592Z. Such a great car to drive. I think the smallest engine in Mini's were 800(and change) c.c, or thereabouts, but badged as 850. The latter is certainly the smallest number I can remember seeing on them. The others main sizes were 998cc (common size used in many other makes, most memorably for me in Hillman Imps) and, of course, the 1275GT.
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Post by Big Blue on Nov 27, 2019 12:09:07 GMT
Careful or I’ll take you into the realms of the 997 Cooper, the slightly inferior 998 Cooper, the sublime 1071 Cooper S and the 1275 Cooper S which was more powerful than the 1275GT....
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Post by Boxer6 on Nov 27, 2019 13:38:15 GMT
Careful or I’ll take you into the realms of the 997 Cooper, the slightly inferior 998 Cooper, the sublime 1071 Cooper S and the 1275 Cooper S which was more powerful than the 1275GT.... All soundly thrashed by the 998-engined Imps and Davrians (with twin 40-Webers!) round Ingliston circuit back in the day! |
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Post by grampa on Dec 3, 2019 19:33:48 GMT
I’ve driven an early ‘magic wand’ 850 Mini but fitted with an 1100cc twin Carb engine, a standard mk3 Mini 1000, a 1275GT, a Clubman 1100 and when the new Mini came along, an R51 Cooper and One, an R56 Cooper, Cooper S and JCW and an F54 Cooper S. would love a go in a 306bhp F54 JCW.
The one thing you can’t accuse any Mini of is being boring to drive.
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