CLASSICS
Happy 60th birthday, Mini!
Conceived as the ultimate low-cost people’s car, it also became a motor racing legend
Nothing prepared you for the first time you saw a Mini, if you happened to be around 60 years ago. Here was a car so radically unlike anything else that had gone beforet that it was almost as if, with a few strokes of the pen designer Alec Issigonis had reinvented the wheel if not the concept of personalised transport. Until then, the British Motor Corporation’s small-car portfolio had consisted of the Morris Minor, a sort of grown-up Noddy car that your granny may have specced in the post-war years of petrol rationing and austerity, and the Austin A35, which resembled a sort of mobile teapot. Here was a tiny box of a car with 80% of its overall size given over to the passenger compartment, about waist high to a Morris or Ford Prefect of the day and with a tiny 10-inch diameter wheel at each of its four corners. It was launched as the ultimate low-cost British people’s car, and it was so austere it came with rubber mats instead of carpets and perspex sliding side windows instead of ...
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