My aunty used to have one of these:
I fell in love, I wanted a Mini. It was helped along by my dad being overtaken on the way to Lakeside by a really loud essex boy Mini. My dad never gets overtaken on country roads so this car was obviously something.
My love petered out, and I started liking these:
I got a little older and started reading Max Power, had visions of owning one of these... er....:
(I am from Essex!)
That waned a little when my uncle became a Gray Import dealer. Suddenly I was thrown into the world of Jap cars:
From the early age of 15 I was suddenly driving Jap cars. A lot of them. You name a high performance Jap car and I've driven it.
Naturally my first car HAD to be Jap, unfortunately it ended up being a Toyota Tercel:
It broke after a year.
I started sharing my sister's 205 CJ:
My dad was supposed to have been bought a brand new Mini for his 18th, but his sister met some guy and they got married, and his parents had to pay for the wedding. They could no longer afford to get him the Mini so he got a Morris Woody estate. The first day you were able to, he had gone straight in for a test drive of the New MINI, he loved it, and he wanted one. Problem was, it wasn't viable as a family car, so he bought this for my sister's 21st/Graduation present:
I got to drive it too since I didn't have a car. Considering my main driving experiences were big power RWD, a 4 door saloon, and a convertible FWD, this was like a breath of fresh air. I didn't know a FWD could handle so well. At the time I was pining after an MX5, and this drove just like an MX5 but FWD. The more I drove it, the more I loved it. Roads that I'd been driving for years were suddenly in a new light to me. Over the next year I drove quite a few euro hatches and they were all pretty useless in comparison, all the French offerings were pants (except for the 106 Rallye, what a car!!!!), and the German ones were bland. The thing about the New MINI for me was, sure if you drove a VR6 Golf it was faster and handled almost as well, but take the Golf equivalent of a One and a Cooper and I was leaving them in the dust. It didn't need more power because you could drive the wheels off it.
My sister then went off to S. America for 11 months and I had free reign over the New MINI. I abused that car and it still came back for more. Then one day I was looking for info on how to plug an iPod into the standard h/u, and came across something.... CAR FORUMS.... I stumbled upon MINI2. From that I joined a local club (East Coast Mini Club) and it was in that club I met this man:
and I met his classic Mini:
All those feelings I had when I was a young boy came rushing back.
So for my 21st birthday I pleaded with my dad and I got this:
Which now looks like this:
The point of this essay is, many people like many different cars, and that's cool.
But for me, without this:
I wouldn't be here on this forum and I definitely wouldn't own this:
Every time I drive one of them for a long period of time I remember how much I love it. For me they are the same car. I can go a little faster in the slower corners in the classic and I can go a little faster in the quicker corners in the new one. My girlfriend lives 40 miles away from me and along the way there's one road from Witham to Braintree called the B1018. I've timed myself when it's empty, going flat out. End to end in both cars, the times are within seconds of each other.
