My First Car

I wish I still had a picture of my first car.  The Polaroids are long gone.  It looked like this except for the details: red grille and silver wheels with better rubber.  This one is the first Mini produced, now in a British car museum.

Well has it been said that first cars are like first loves: never forgotten.  I was a broke college student, but had pulled together enough money to buy a small used motorcycle.  My mother was horrified.  Visions of me dead in the road filled her head.  "If we doubled your grubstake, would you buy a car?"  I didn't think I could find a decent car for that amount (which I recall as $600).

I heard about a kid who had a 7-year-old Mini for sale.  It turned out that he was an imported car mechanic, and had been preparing the car for sedan racing.  But he had come into some money, and had bought a new Hillman Imp, thinking it would be a better platform.  The "new" part, I get; the "better" part I don't--Minis were already legendary for playing David to everyone else's Goliath.  It had won the Monte Carlo Rally two or three times, and had been tearing up British sedan racing for years.

I had one such story myself.  In 1960, I'd been at Mid-Ohio when a Canadian brought the first Mini seen in them thar parts to an SCCA Regional race.  They ran him against the G and H Production cars (engines 40% bigger).  He lapped most of the field.  So they ran him in E and F Production.  He won.  So they ran him in C and D Production.  He finished halfway up the field, against cars with engines three times the size of his.  So I was kinda...ripe...as a Mini sales prospect.

My Mini was neither fish nor fowl: its race-prep was incomplete.  The upgrades included a racing-quality lap belt, a big Sun tach strapped to the steering column, wider, grippy, Dunlop SP-41 radials, a two-carb intake manifold, and a big Alfa Romeo resonator.  (It looked and sounded like those tuner cars we see these days with Borlas sticking out the back.)  The downgrade was a stripped interior, painted battleship grey.  With a brush.

"Put a heater in it and you've got a deal," I told the kid.  He ran some hose from the engine to an Alfa Romeo heater box attached to the dash with sheet-metal screws, and the car was mine.  Convection only: no defroster vents, no fan motor.  There was a valve in the hose to shut it off in summer.  In winter, you scraped the inside of the windshield.

I loved that car.  The Bad News was that, with a stock 850 c.c. engine, it peaked at about 65 m.p.h. for comfortable cruising.  No matter: all my driving then was two-lane.  The Good News was that you wore the car.  It drove like a go-kart with a roof: ridiculously fast around street corners.  It was rock-steady in faster bends.  Driving technique was simple: foot to the floor, always, unless shifting down.

Fast Forward 40 years.  The "New Mini" had been out for a few years.  I was at first charmed,  but increasingly disenchanted with the long-term road test reports.  The interior was too "Game Boy" for me, and my head hit the sunroof frame.  When my daughter bought a New Mini, I was disappointed: she belonged in a Japanese econobox, it seemed to me.  Longer and better acquaintance with her car has not changed my mind.  I myself had bought a Honda Civic Si, which I considered to be the real reincarnation of the original Mini-Cooper.  Then I stumbled across the car below in a small town in Belgium, in 2010.  This is a Mini: 

The Full Mini Monte: the paint and lights of this car are a "tribute" to the Monte Carlo Rally Minis.

Note the Nurburgring sticker on the trunk.  The owner lives about 60 miles from the 'Ring.  Alas, he spoke only French and I spoke only English, so we could not chat.  But I have no doubt that he knows, loves, and uses, what he has.