If there's anything the Mini Cooper proves, it's that there's something worth preserving in even the biggest disasters — even the collapse of the British car industry. The Mini Cooper may be small, but it's a survivor.
The Mini Cooper story starts with a brilliant engineer named Alec Issigonis who was working for the British Motor Company in the late 1950s. Approaching the challenge of designing a car that would use fuel as efficiently as possible, Issigonis dumped all the conventional wisdom about how a car should be built and came up with the brilliant idea of placing the engine transversely up front to drive the front wheels.
That innovation isolated virtually all the car's mechanical elements in its nose, leaving the rest of the structure to accommodate passengers and cargo. Throw in a lot more clever engineering, endearing styling and a bunch of cheeky British character and you have the original, agonizingly tiny, Austin Mini that entered production in 1959. Dozens of variations both slight and great soon followed. The original Mini Cooper came a couple years later.
The first Mini Cooper was the product of Alec Issigonis' friend John Cooper who ran the Cooper Car Company that built open-wheel formula cars. Looking at the original Austin Mini, Cooper decided there was a competition machine in there waiting to be let out. So in 1961 Cooper stroked the Mini's original 848cc engine to 997cc and added dual carburetors to increase available output from 34 to 55 horsepower to create the Mini Cooper. After that came the even stronger Mini Cooper S in 1963, three straight wins in the Monte Carlo Rally and a legend.
The original Mini Cooper stayed in production through 2000 as the British auto industry disintegrated around it. But BMW picked up the Mini pieces and in 2001 introduced a new, larger Mini including a supercharged version known as the Mini Cooper S. An instant hit, the nostalgia-styled new Mini eventually included a convertible model. The second-generation new Mini appeared for the 2007 model year and includes a Clubman wagon. The Mini Cooper is here to stay.
