Mini Independent Service

Small Car, Big Legacy

When Sir Alec Issigonis created a small, practical car in 1959, he could hardly have imagined it would become part of people's lives for the next 47 years — a rare design object that shaped lifestyles as much as it shaped motoring.

John Cooper, who had met Issigonis in 1946, was convinced the Mini deserved a high-performance, race-ready version. George Harriman commissioned him in 1961, and some 150,000 Mini Coopers were eventually built. At the 1965 Monte Carlo Rally six Mini Cooper S cars lined up at the start; Timo Makinen and Paul Easter won clearly that year, and in 1967 Rauno Aaltonen and Liddon continued the little car's remarkable run of rally success.

Its transversely mounted engine won hearts, rewrote the rules of car design and made the Mini part of a social revolution. In 1995 readers of the British magazine Autocar voted the tiny giant Car of the Century.

The classic mini, built from 1959 to 2000, is written in lower case; today's cars, which reached their modern lines under a project team led by Frank Stephenson, are written as MINI. MINI is the brand's name — Cooper denotes the model.