Mini turns twenty-five

Press, 30 August 1984, Page 6

Mini turns twenty-five

NZPA London Mini mania broke out, when 100,000 guests turned up at its bumper twentyfifth birthday party to toast the great little car. "We’re overwhelmed by the response, it’s beyond our wildest dreams,” said Mr Norman Childs, spokesman for Austin Rover, who organised the free party. “There are two or three times as many people here as we expected and thousands of them are driving Minis.” At least 750 examples of Sir Alec Issigonis’s brainchild were on display at the get-together in Donington Park racing circuit,

near Derby. Mr Bernard Ferriman, aged 80, from Oxford, arrived in his June, 1959, registered car —148,000 km on the clock — still in its original paintwork. “I rarely drive over 50 miles an hour and the car has never been out in the snow and if it gets wet I wipe it down before putting it in for the night,” he said. Mr Childs declared, “We have 60 Minis giving test drives, and by 10.30 a.m. they were booked up for the rest of the day. “It just shows the love thatjjpeople have for this car thayyas kept it going for

the last 25 years.” It was on August 26, 1959, that the Mini first roared into a motoring world packed with all too often boring, sluggish — and expensive — cars. The little wonder broke the class barrier, and a tuned-up version took the chequered flag at races and rallies. Nearly five million Minis have now been built, about half either sold or assembled abroad. Last year 28,000 were sold in Britain alone, and just as long as the charisma lasts, Austin Rover says it will conti&e on making them.