Quote:
Originally Posted by gtilove
Very special car. Do you know the competition history?
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In short, no, but I have some clues and I'm trying to piece it together.
I got a lot of paperwork with the car and know some of it's history, but I'm finding it's very difficult to discover it's competition history.The FIA paperwork I have was issued in 1997 and lists all the previous owners back to 1965. However, it does not include previous competition history. I can find results of several Finnish club rallies in which the owner, so I presume the car, has competed. Who knows, the owner could have had more than one Mini and the results don't show the identity of individual cars. Of course, all of these events were in the pre-internet, or very early internet era, so it's hard to find anything except printed data online. Just to make it more difficult, it's all in Finnish.
Still, it's an interesting research project for me, and it's the car I wanted regardless of the history.
I'm interested to see the level of interest for the old Mini on this board. It's so far removed from a Porsche in just about every way imaginable, except individual character. May I ask what it is about the car that each of you find appealing? From my perspective, it's a few of things;
1) Nostalgia. My Father had a '65 Morris Mini that was his Father's. He road rallied that with my Mother, and it was the car he used to bring my Mother and I home from the hospital when I was born. I owned two more myself growing up, and I always wanted on in the USA.
2) Admiration of the engineering design. It's such a wonderfully simple design, and meets the design objective of creating the as much space as possible in a small car. There is storage space everywhere in the car. The early, sliding window cars demonstrate this best with the big, front door pockets - lost once wind-up windows were added.
3) It's archetypal Britishness. For me it's a little link back to my home country. No desire to move back there, but I like to have little reminders here and there.