CAR reader Sven Teisen on his Mini cheap thrills

By Sven Teisen

Spy shots

09 October 2009 00:53

Phew, where to start? My first car was a 1991 City 998 in white. What a hog, it literally took me a matter of days to rid it of the unsightly neon green decals and install a chequered roof. Queue the 12" polished wheels, piles of chrome, dropped steering wheel and hacked off suspension cones. I'm not sure it was even on each side. I loved tinkering with it in my garage, polish this, buff that. I spent innumerable hours leafing through the mags for my next 'bit', planning exactly how it was to look.

This however goes no way to explaining how much I loved driving it. As soon as I passed my test and found out quite how brilliantly I could lose all my friends in their bigger faster hatches the aesthetic mods stopped and in came some bucket seats. Now my favourite game would be to go out hunting faster cars to 'embarrass'. Down roads that I knew well, with no or very few straights, nothing could keep up.

I can remember one sunday morning being glued to the behind of a Boxster, doing everything in my power to prove that the mini was superior. Breaking desperately late for bends, it was all about carrying speed in the mini with about 40bhp! When to my absolute delight round the corner in front of me came a Mk3 Golf GTi with a mini pinned to its tail, clearly enjoying the same sunday morning banter as me.

Other great moments include my first taste of oversteer on a wet roundabout, completely by accident, but then the game was all about how to get it more sideways. Lift of oversteer, a scandi flick, sometimes a cheeky grab at the handbrake.

My mum would hear me leaving work (4 miles away) and count the gear changes in the time it would take me to get home. I had a huge DTM style exhaust, childish yes, which popped and growled. 'So you took the end of the lane in 3rd today then Sven, not in as much of a hurry as yesterday?'

What an epic car, I really do miss it. It really goes to show that you can have fun even with a pidly little engine.