Project Petrolhead

Unrest in the Middle East. Armies fighting for control of a crucial global shipping route. Consumers price gouged at the pumps. The General public sleepwalking into overreliance on a commodity that’s about to be snatched from underneath them. I am of course talking about the 1956 Suez Crisis… And nothing else… Don’t read anything into it. Yes, I found myself thinking recently about a global fuel crisis for some unknown reason, but rather than spending a few thousand words wallowing in nihilism, I thought it might be interesting to explore how the British public bounced back from the precipice and inadvertently gave us one of the world’s most iconic cars in the process. 

Due to the aforementioned global palaver, petrol was in short supply in mid-50s Britain, with the government forced to bring in rationing to stop people from panic-buying fuel they couldn’t store, and pretty much overnight, the sales of large cars dried up. Now, there was one preexisting avenue that British car companies could have gone down. Post-war Germany had spent the last decade developing their own low-cost, fuel-efficient mass-transport solution, and it was called the Bubble Car. Well, Microcar is the technical term, but you all know what a Bubble Car is. Isettas, Messerschmitts, Heinkels, all daubed with faux-art deco styling and puttering around with unsophisticated, clattery two-stroke engines. One chap in particular absolutely hated them. His name was Leonard Lord, and he just happened to be in charge of BMC, the single biggest car manufacturer in Britain. Faced with the prospect of walking to work – or worse, being seen in a Heinkel – Lord commissioned designer Alec Issigonis – fresh off the development of the smash hit Morris Minor – to build a brand-new car, and as this would be the perfect small car for Britain, it had to measure no more than ten feet long, and four feet wide. 

Immediately, there was a problem. Ten by four is not a massive amount of space at the best of times, but Issigonis had to fit five passengers, all their luggage AND an engine and gearbox to make the whole thing move. Clearly, they would have to develop an all-new, much smaller engine in order to make it work. But no. With BMC’s sales plummeting, there simply wasn’t the cash available to develop a brand-new engine from scratch, so Issigonis was forced to use the smallest engine BMC had; the 950cc A-Series from the Austin A35. And then Issigonis had a brainwave. You see, in a conventional car of the time, the engine had to be mounted longitudinally, so that the gearbox could be mounted to the back of the engine to drive the rear wheels. By turning the engine ninety degrees, and driving the front wheels instead, they could tuck the engine right up into the car’s nose, saving a huge amount of cabin space for the passengers. With the floorplan sorted, Issigonis set to work designing the bodywork, while his development team built the prototype, grafting on the front end of an A35 so they could drive the prototype on the roads unnoticed. 

Just 30 months passed between sketch and showroom, with the covers coming off the new car in 1959. Launched as both the Morris Mini Minor and the Austin Seven, the name “Mini” seemed to stick in the public consciousness and quickly usurped the official names to become the car’s lifelong designation. Launched with the famous demonstration of how much stuff you could fit into one (including six passengers, which I’m sure wasn’t comfortable), and sporting a new, more economical 848cc version of the A-Series that was still capable of over 70mph, the Mini went on sale for just £500. Immediately, people were interested, with BMC shifting 20,000 cars in 1959 alone. By 1962 they were building them at a rate of around 200,000 per year! It even caught the eye of some celebrities. Twiggy, Steve McQueen, Peter Sellers, all four of the Beatles, even Enzo Ferrari. The Mini was cool, stylish and completely classless. No wonder it has cemented itself as arguably one of the greatest cars ever made, not just in Britain, but globally. In 2011, when PistonHeads polled their users for the 100 Greatest Cars Of All Time, the humble Mini came 1^st, pipping the McLaren F1, Porsche 911 and Ferrari F40.  

Of course, it wasn’t just a style icon. Give a man a Mini and he’ll drive it like a wally. Around the car sprang up myriad cottage industry tuners. Arden, Speedwell, Downton Engineering, each one content to push the little A-Series to the Nth degree, and for good reason. The Mini was great to drive. This, however, wasn’t entirely intentional. To further save on the limited cabin space, the Mini eschewed conventional coil springs in favour of rubber cone suspension built directly into the subframe. Rubber cones might not have been as comfortable as normal springs, but they did mean that the Mini stayed flat under hard cornering. They also allowed the wheels to be mounted further out into the car’s corners, giving the Mini an almost four-square stance on the road, and keeping all the weight inside the wheelbase. The end result handled like… something… some sort of small, recreational racing car… I’m sure they have a proper name, but I kart think of it for the life of me. 

In 1962, BMC themselves cottoned on, partnering with tuning specialist John Cooper to release a high-performance version of the Mini direct from dealerships, and the Mini Cooper S was born. With a whopping 74 horsepower on tap (I mock, but that’s double the power the Mini launched with), the Cooper S was a little terrier of a car, with racing versions getting up the noses of much more powerful competitors, and a rally version so successful that it took Paddy Hopkirk to victory in the 1964 Monte Carlo Rally. Naturally then, when Troy Kennedy Martin was penning the script for his 1969 heist movie, that needed three small, fast cars to escape from Italian police through a traffic jam, he knew exactly where to look. The Italian Job immortalised the Mini Cooper as the ultimate symbol of caddish cool, and the perfect car for stealing gold from the mafia. I’ll have mine in red with a black roof and rally spotlights, please. 

Sports car, family estate, van, pickup, Moke, convertible, the Mini has always been ubiquitous. It showed the world the economy didn’t have to be dour and boring, tempting people out of their enormous land yachts and into a small, lightweight car with a microscopic engine by injecting it with fun and style. I know I joked at the beginning, but I really do think that – with the current state of the world, and the current crop of oversized, overheavy cars on sale – we’re in desperate need of another Mini moment.