Maximum Mini: Whatever happened to the Saga?

Some cars are easy to track down, others aren't quite so. The Saga fits in with the latter and has proved to be quite a - erm - Saga - to find. So far with no result.

The Mini based creature was built in 1964 by Brian Diss, who’d just left sports car manufacturer Elva. Diss told me back in 2009: “When I left them, I decided to build this on my own and finished it as a prototype. My job at Elva was making the moulds and that was also what I wanted to do with this car. It was meant to have a hatchback in the production version.” Diss based his Saga on a tubular steel frame chassis with a double marine ply floor. It used an 850cc engine from a written-off Mini with new subframes at both the front and the rear. He made the body from aluminum. Diss married to a French girl not long after and took the car with him to France, where he opened a garage in Avignon. "I sprayed it a dark red, an Opel Monza colour, and used it to go on a holiday to southern France. We must have done 20,000 miles in it.” Diss, his family and the Saga came back to England after two years, now setting up a company repairing accident cars for insurance companies. The prototype was sold in 1970 or 1971 and was last seen in the mid-1990s (click!). Where is it now?

These unique pictures were given to me by Brian Diss.