Beautiful new pictures of Unipower GT racer
This is the Mk1 Mini Marcos of the 1966 Racing Car Show
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Showing posts with label BP Buildacar Competition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BP Buildacar Competition. Show all posts
Thursday, 29 January 2026
Monday, 23 June 2025
Now in Maximum Mini Newsletter #79
5 Stimson Scorcher replicas / rip-offs
Unipower GT: lost film footage found, director's daughter tracked down and a heavy crash
The 4-wheel drive Mini derivative - made by the Ford Motor Company
Monday, 16 June 2025
Now in Maximum Mini Newsletter #78
John Lennon's Radford Mini De Ville replica is a real stunner
Julien Vernaeve passes away at 94
Yet another Mini based oddity from the BP Build-a-Car Contest
Tuesday, 20 February 2024
Now in Maximum Mini Newsletter #12
Paola GT - closer to revealing its real identity
Phoenix City Car explained by its creator
Unipower GT of Ecurie Canada
Tuesday, 7 January 2020
Add-a-car on the move!
Moving images of 'Add-A-Car' have made it to these pages before, but another cool video has now been unearthed. To freshen up your memory - Add-A-Car was a Mini-based town car that could be turned into a six-wheeler, as built by the boys of Daventry's Southbrook Comprehensive School for the BP Buildacar competition in 1978 (click here to see the earlier film clip). Thanks to a number of readers who made me aware of it, new footage is now added below. It fully shows the many uses of the vehicle with teacher and pupils demonstrating it. Great stuff! Still it does raise the question: Could the car survive?
Tuesday, 16 January 2018
Silcoates Ascender and Mini Mouse mysteries found
Time for some mystery and intrigue, as this is a strange story about some cars, which even the original builder cannot fully explain!
When you've read Maximum Mini 3 you may remember the Cream Cracker, the Silcoates Ascender and the Silcoates Blue Car - all three cars built for the BP Buildacar design competition in the 1980s by students of Silcoates prep school in Yorkshire and all under the guidance of teacher Les Brown.
Well... The Ascender was taken over by one of the students and used regularly by him until recently when he decided to sell it. I got in touch with Les some years ago, he told me some great tales and sent me some great photographs. One of them showed the Ascender at the Silcoates school where it was joined by the 'Mini Mouse'. Not a Mini derivative, but another one of Les' fun projects. He wrote: "The Mini Mouse used racing go-kart parts with a Mini-style fibreglass body. The engine came from a 125cc Honda Spacey scooter, electric start, water cooled, full working electrics etc. Appeared on TV several times, terrific fun with power slides possible at the touch of the throttle. Too much fun, in fact it was stolen from out of it's garage." It was not included in any of the books, as it is of course not a Mini derivative, but I liked the little thing anyway.
Over to last summer when I visited Peter and Paul at Seventies Car Restorations, who are working on my Marcos and who also showed me some of their own projects. When Peter told me he had an Ascender in the garden, you bet I was interested. I knew supposedly just one was made - the yellow and black one. But Peter's example was red. And when he showed it to me it certainly seemed he was right about it being an Ascender! How was that possible? Things got even stranger when Paul took me to his place the next day to show one of his projects when under a tarpaulin came the body of... a Mini Mouse! Now, what was that?
I contacted Les Brown, writing: "I believed there was just one Ascender made, but to my own unbelief I bumped into another (unfinished) one last August. Only to bump into the shell of a Mini Mouse the next day on another address! Can you believe this? I’m sure you’ll know more about them?"
Les came back to me with the following: "Hi Jeroen. This is a strange. Well, I'm not sure I DO know what's going on! I built a Mini trike around 1975 from a 1962 Cooper that had rusted past economic repair at that time - 653 UMA. I kept as much as I could of the original Mini, and the car couldn't believe its luck when completed! All that weight gone, just 3 wheels to turn, and it absolutely flew! The red car looks substantially what I had done, though it still had a Mini floor pan originally. I sold it around 1990 to one of the students who had worked on the cars and I knew he decided to 'improve' on certain aspects of the design that he didn't approve of. My chassis was not symmetrical as I used a standard Mini rear arm, which meant the tubes were offset to follow the new load paths as far as possible. He started to make a new (symmetric) chassis which looked very heavy to me, but I thought the whole lot had been abandoned and scrapped years ago. I certainly made the front end that you see, and possibly some of the surviving chassis is mine also. Just to avoid confusion, I painted them all different colours, and the one we knew as "Ascender" was essentially a development of the red car. It does still exist and was down around the Devon area in the last 12 months, though this also had now lost the original '653 UMA'."
"The other is even more puzzling. The 'Mouse' worked very well also, though it had to be narrowed a little from the original racing go-Kart spec. But it still went like stink, and I suspect it would have blown off most full-sized Minis with its 12bhp Honda engine. Is this one still around? It clearly looks to have been moulded from the original shell, and I had once thought myself of selling such items. But it isn't the original, which was moulded using some blue pigment that we had lying around at the time. The interesting thing here - I sold the Mouse to another of the students but it was subsequently stolen from his garage! So, the crucial thing is, did he take a mould off BEFORE it disappeared or is it the work of someone else? The originals of each car were in the Huddersfield/Wakefield area.
The Mini was something that just cried out for a kit - are you up to speed on the made-in-Chile examples? They aren't really kits at all, but I couldn't leave them, or the GRP MG 1300s out of the book either. Wouldn't mind one now, actually..."
I've brought Les in touch with Peter and Paul, but if anyone can shed more light on this matter here...
When you've read Maximum Mini 3 you may remember the Cream Cracker, the Silcoates Ascender and the Silcoates Blue Car - all three cars built for the BP Buildacar design competition in the 1980s by students of Silcoates prep school in Yorkshire and all under the guidance of teacher Les Brown.
Well... The Ascender was taken over by one of the students and used regularly by him until recently when he decided to sell it. I got in touch with Les some years ago, he told me some great tales and sent me some great photographs. One of them showed the Ascender at the Silcoates school where it was joined by the 'Mini Mouse'. Not a Mini derivative, but another one of Les' fun projects. He wrote: "The Mini Mouse used racing go-kart parts with a Mini-style fibreglass body. The engine came from a 125cc Honda Spacey scooter, electric start, water cooled, full working electrics etc. Appeared on TV several times, terrific fun with power slides possible at the touch of the throttle. Too much fun, in fact it was stolen from out of it's garage." It was not included in any of the books, as it is of course not a Mini derivative, but I liked the little thing anyway.
Over to last summer when I visited Peter and Paul at Seventies Car Restorations, who are working on my Marcos and who also showed me some of their own projects. When Peter told me he had an Ascender in the garden, you bet I was interested. I knew supposedly just one was made - the yellow and black one. But Peter's example was red. And when he showed it to me it certainly seemed he was right about it being an Ascender! How was that possible? Things got even stranger when Paul took me to his place the next day to show one of his projects when under a tarpaulin came the body of... a Mini Mouse! Now, what was that?
I contacted Les Brown, writing: "I believed there was just one Ascender made, but to my own unbelief I bumped into another (unfinished) one last August. Only to bump into the shell of a Mini Mouse the next day on another address! Can you believe this? I’m sure you’ll know more about them?"
Les came back to me with the following: "Hi Jeroen. This is a strange. Well, I'm not sure I DO know what's going on! I built a Mini trike around 1975 from a 1962 Cooper that had rusted past economic repair at that time - 653 UMA. I kept as much as I could of the original Mini, and the car couldn't believe its luck when completed! All that weight gone, just 3 wheels to turn, and it absolutely flew! The red car looks substantially what I had done, though it still had a Mini floor pan originally. I sold it around 1990 to one of the students who had worked on the cars and I knew he decided to 'improve' on certain aspects of the design that he didn't approve of. My chassis was not symmetrical as I used a standard Mini rear arm, which meant the tubes were offset to follow the new load paths as far as possible. He started to make a new (symmetric) chassis which looked very heavy to me, but I thought the whole lot had been abandoned and scrapped years ago. I certainly made the front end that you see, and possibly some of the surviving chassis is mine also. Just to avoid confusion, I painted them all different colours, and the one we knew as "Ascender" was essentially a development of the red car. It does still exist and was down around the Devon area in the last 12 months, though this also had now lost the original '653 UMA'."
"The other is even more puzzling. The 'Mouse' worked very well also, though it had to be narrowed a little from the original racing go-Kart spec. But it still went like stink, and I suspect it would have blown off most full-sized Minis with its 12bhp Honda engine. Is this one still around? It clearly looks to have been moulded from the original shell, and I had once thought myself of selling such items. But it isn't the original, which was moulded using some blue pigment that we had lying around at the time. The interesting thing here - I sold the Mouse to another of the students but it was subsequently stolen from his garage! So, the crucial thing is, did he take a mould off BEFORE it disappeared or is it the work of someone else? The originals of each car were in the Huddersfield/Wakefield area.
The Mini was something that just cried out for a kit - are you up to speed on the made-in-Chile examples? They aren't really kits at all, but I couldn't leave them, or the GRP MG 1300s out of the book either. Wouldn't mind one now, actually..."
I've brought Les in touch with Peter and Paul, but if anyone can shed more light on this matter here...
Silcoates prep school, early 1980s. The Mini Mouse on the left, the Ascender on the right
Picture Les Brown / Jeroen Booij archive
And that's the Silcoates Ascender more recently, when it was offered for sale
Picture Jeroen Booij archive
Original registration '653 UMA' is gone, but there is no doubt this is the real deal
Picture Jeroen Booij archive
But then we found this... Supposedly a forerunner that was believed to have been scrapped
Picture Jeroen Booij
It was probably the car built by Brown in '76 using a Mini Cooper powertrain
Picture Jeroen Booij
And then this! The stolen Mini Mouse produced some offspring, or so it seemed
Picture Jeroen Booij
It seems never to have been finished. But was it made before or after the Mouse got stolen?
Picture Jeroen Booij
Monday, 23 November 2015
Add-A-car is the Mini based 6-wheeler for 2025
The BP Buildacar Competition sprouted a whole range of Mini based cars between 1972 and 1986, some of which have been seen here before. Click here for the 1974 Cranleigh entry and here for the Phoenix of the same year. Canadian reader and regular tipster Miguel Plano now pointed me towards the 1978 competition, which saw another Mini based entry as its winner. The car in question was named 'Add-a-car' and was built by the boys of Southbrook Comprehensive School of Daventry. The trick was that it could be turned from a nippy 4-wheeler town car into a roomier six-wheeler / six-seater by simply adding a fastback-ish rear with clips! And there is film footage of it, too, see below and scroll to 1 minute 52. I know of several competition cars surviving. So how about this one?
Apart from the video, I found a little article about the 1978 competition, which I quote from here: "BP Oil's Buildacar Competition, which is part of the company's 'challenge to youth' scheme, is to be widened to include non-oil sources of energy, such as electricity, coal, steam and wind. Natural or liquid gas is excluded because of its hazards. Schools taking part in the project are to produce a study of the form of personal-transport likely to be used in towns in 2025. Southbrook Comprehensive School, Daventry, won the finals staged two months ago. Pupils produced a revolutionary 'Add-A-car."
Apart from the video, I found a little article about the 1978 competition, which I quote from here: "BP Oil's Buildacar Competition, which is part of the company's 'challenge to youth' scheme, is to be widened to include non-oil sources of energy, such as electricity, coal, steam and wind. Natural or liquid gas is excluded because of its hazards. Schools taking part in the project are to produce a study of the form of personal-transport likely to be used in towns in 2025. Southbrook Comprehensive School, Daventry, won the finals staged two months ago. Pupils produced a revolutionary 'Add-A-car."
Monday, 5 December 2011
University challenge
The Phoenix of last week's Mystery Mini Derivative is not the only Mini based car emerging from BP's 1974 Buildacar contest. In fact, the winning entry was based on a Mini, too. And Jon Barber sent me a link of the vehicle in question in motion! See it here. The thing was built by the boys of Cranleigh public school, came with five doors and 60 cubic feet of luggage space, or four seats with masses of leg room. A Mini Van found in a scrap yard provided subframes and suspension plus shortened and narrowed roof. The engine, however, came from a 2CV and was placed under the front seats. Thanks Jon!
But apart from the Cranleigh entry and the Phoenix, there were several more Mini based creatures, or so I found out. Langtree Comprehensive school came over with an aluminium bodied and boxy shaped Mini based thingy; William Temple School had a Postman Pat-like Van with four-wheel steering and, again, Mini power and then there was a Mini-based contraption using a much altered and ultra wide Messerschmitt body and chassis! The boys who built the cars must be in their early fifties now. Where are they? And who has more information about the contest and the unusual vehicles it gave birth to?
But apart from the Cranleigh entry and the Phoenix, there were several more Mini based creatures, or so I found out. Langtree Comprehensive school came over with an aluminium bodied and boxy shaped Mini based thingy; William Temple School had a Postman Pat-like Van with four-wheel steering and, again, Mini power and then there was a Mini-based contraption using a much altered and ultra wide Messerschmitt body and chassis! The boys who built the cars must be in their early fifties now. Where are they? And who has more information about the contest and the unusual vehicles it gave birth to?
Cranleigh's winning entry was part Mini based, as more BP Buildacar cars
Picture courtesy www.itnsource.com
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Mystery Mini derivative (18)
The name, date and even the venue where this Mystery Mini derivative was unveiled are known, but still then, most about the car in the blurry pic below remains shrouded in mystery. It was built as a project for the 'BP Buildacar Competition' of 1974 and named Phoenix. The caption reads: "Also mid-engined and Mini-based this neat design was all-steel monocoque. Note Avenger boot lid!" But that's it. Is there anyone out there who knows more about it?
It's Mini based and appears to be named Phoenix, but that's about it
Picture courtesy Hot Car magazine
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