>> In the new November 2009 issue of CAR Magazine, executive editor Gavin Green writes about a seriously big adventure in a Mini: driving 4155 miles from Sydney on the east coast of Australia to Perth on the western seaboard via Ayers Rock and the middle of nowhere. See the full adventure – with 10 pages of amazing Mark Bramley photography like the colour photos here – in the new issue out now. Here’s the inspiration behind his drive
Minis may have won the Monte Carlo Rally and they (almost) pulled off the biggest heist in Italian criminal history. But the greatest-ever Mini adventure was undertaken in Australia in late 1965. Four adventurers drove a Mini (an Aussie-spec 998cc Morris Mini Deluxe) and a support vehicle, mostly on impossibly rough desert tracks, right across Australia. It was the first-ever east-west crossing of the world’s driest and least populated continent, by land, through the centre. That journey had never been done before – not by camel, horse, foot, truck or 4×4.
An Austin 1800 supported the Mini and so (on the roughest stretches) did a Land Rover. Castrol sponsored the trip, to prove the hot weather capability of its new GTX engine oil. British cars were used partly because Castrol’s biggest market was the UK. Choosing British vehicles would further stoke publicity.
The party leader was my dad.
I was just a kid when he undertook that journey. I remember it primarily because it caused him to miss Christmas that year. It forms my first (in a long list) of rich Mini memories.
He was also Australia’s top works Mini rally driver at the time, and in the ’60s the Cooper S was one of the world’s most effective rally weapons. I remember riding on board when he was practising through eucalypt forests near Sydney, stones bouncing off the car’s belly like a fusillade of bullets, four-cylinder engine wailing like a banshee, the little car brushing low-hanging branches at high-speed. I was barely big enough to see out the window.
We all have our Mini memories. That’s one reason it is such an iconic car. But memories really don’t get any better than that.
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