FASHION STATEMENT
It's hard to think of another car that evokes its era as potently as the Mini Cooper does. Born in 1961, it seems to represent fun motoring in the Sixties just as powerfully as the Jaguar E-Type represents glamour. If the standard front-driven Mini - so elegantly engineered with its transverse engine and sump-mounted gearbox - brought classlessness to small-car motoring, then the Cooper was even more democratic: here, at last, was a tiny car with a big heart which didn't necessarily have to move over when something larger and more ostentatious loomed in its rear-view mirror. Owning a Mini, especially a Cooper or Cooper S, is something everyone should do at least once as one of life's great motoring experiences.
Developed by John Cooper, owner of a successful Grand Prix racing team, the car was a natural rally and race winner and has also become part of the mythology of cool, swinging London in the Sixties. Luminaries such as Peter Sellers, The Beatles and all the rest were irresistibly drawn to the zestful cheek and sheer chic of these cars. To own a Mini Cooper was as important as wearing the right clothes, having the right haircut and being seen in the right places in an era when style and youthfulness were so important, and its place in history was assured with the Cooper S's appearance in The Italian Job in 1969 (a film merely co-starring Michael Caine).
But there was a sense that the chaotic BMC empire didn't really know what they had in this king of small cars, and the demise of the Cooper in favour of the flashy square-nosed 1275 GT in 1971 was a fair indication of just how ideologically bankrupt the new Leyland regime really was. Somehow, you can't imagine four Clubmans - all in Harvest Gold because they probably didn't have any other colours that week - doing battle with the Turin constabulary, can you?
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