There is no denying that the great British Motor Corporation itself looked sideways to what happened in the Mini derivatives scene in the 1960s and 1970s. No surprise really with so many variants coming from all sorts of places, it was clear that there was a market for them. But how exactly they needed to come up with a Mini based sports car of their own remained a big question. There were the front engined ADO 34 and ADO 35 prototypes to start with, as there was the later ADO 70 concept.
With a great number of drawings and sketches from the BMC drawing office of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which are now offered for sale, we get to see a glimpse of the company's ideas for Mini successors or Mini based sports cars. All of them come from the hand of John Worker, who joined the BMC team as a designer after a job at Ogle Design. The drawings will be sold through auction on November 4th by Anglia Car Auctions, and you can see / bid on all of them here.
The red car reminded me of a story told to me by ex-BMC employee Colin Groom. After BMC, Colin had set up his own business restoring classic cars, mostly British. In the 90’s I had just bought a Fiat X19 and gave it to him to paint. He said that the original X19 concept was BMC and they had actually built a prototype powered by a Cooper S engine, but had to shelve the project due to difficulties keeping the 1275 unit cool. The design was sold to Fiat and then the X19 appeared. The BMC design initially had an electric rear window, but this was dropped by Fiat as it was too expensive.
ReplyDeleteThat is quite an amazing story and it does make me wonder if it was ever documented in words or pictures?
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