HILLMAN SUPER MINX
REDEMPTION FOR A FAMILY FAVOURITE
Chris Steele can almost remember the excitement when his father phoned his grandmother one day and said, “You have to come and look at this car!” His father was the service manager for a Rootes Group agency, and someone had brought in a one-year-old 1966 Hillman Super Minx with 2700 miles on it as a trade-in. It was quite a step up from his grandad’s Austin A40.
“On the same day, they drove away in it,” says Chris. He doesn’t really actually remember the occasion, as he wasn’t even born then, but the car has been such a constant in his life, and the story has been told so often, that it’s almost as if he remembers being there.
You can imagine the excitement. Compared with an A40; the similar-sized Austin Cambridge; and, especially, the Minx, which was still being sold alongside the Super Minx at the time, the new car would have seemed very modern.
The standard Audax-body Minx had smaller windows and a slightly claustrophobic interior, resulting from its rather hunched shape. The straight lines of the Super Minx, the acres of space inside, and its airy glasshouse — especially this later model, with its six-light design — would have been a revelation. It also had a wooden dashboard, just like the upmarket Triumphs, Rovers, and Jags.
Nana’s ring marks on the steering wheel
Chris Steele’s grandmother owned the Mark IV Super Minx from 1967 through to 2000, kept it garaged every night, and kept detailed notes of everything done to the car, in tiny writing in tiny notebooks. In one of them, she recorded that she had paid £1165 for it.
“If the car got rained on, it was always dried down,” says Chris.
This attention to the details is clearly in the genes. When restoring the car, Chris sourced, among many other parts, a mint-condition steering wheel, but it’s still in its packaging. The one in the car bears the scars of his grandmother’s rings.
“I’ve got a near-concours-condition wheel, but I couldn’t bear to change it,” Chris explains. “It’s a special feeling that comes from knowing [that] that’s the same wheel they held.”
The car carries another memento, this one from Chris’ grandfather. The Super Minx had come with a small
Whenever he saw a Hillman Super Minx in red with a white flash, he’d be looking for the plate or other clues to see if it was Nana’s old ‘Geraldine’
green reflector on the front bumper. They were popular accessories at the time, but then they were outlawed and the man at the warrant of fitness station said that it had to be removed. Chris’ grandad asked for a hammer. He smashed the small green lens out, leaving just the mount, and said, “There you go. Now can we have a warrant?”
Space-age branding
Now that the car belongs to Chris (again), he cherishes its history as much as its originality.
Yes — again. When his grandmother decided to get an automatic with power steering, she passed the Hillman on to Chris. He was, naturally, delighted. He had many happy memories of being driven around in the car, and then driving his grandparents around in it in turn, and being told off for riding the clutch (he says that he wasn’t). He remembers his childhood fascination with the 3D enamel and transparent plastic Rootes Group badge on the dash, which looked so space age.
However, after a couple years, this young man about town decided that he needed to sell the car, as he was heading overseas. He wasn’t entirely callous about it, though. He had vetted the buyers, who were members of the Humber Hillman Club and decided that they were the right people to sell it to.
“But I never forgot about that car,” Chris tells us. “I really regretted selling it.”
Whenever he saw a Hillman Super Minx in red with a white flash, he’d be looking for the plate or other clues to see if it was Nana’s old ‘Geraldine’.
Eventually, as Hillman Super Minx sightings dropped away, Chris decided that he had to try to find the car. The people he had sold it to had passed it on. He discovered the registration was on hold, but it was already past the time when you could look up owners online from a car’s rego plates. Chris contacted the New Zealand Transport Authority (NZTA), explaining that he wanted to buy the car back and asking to contact the current owner. He was told that the authority couldn’t provide details because of the Privacy Act. Chris was quite persistent and, in the end, spoke to a senior executive, who agreed to send the owner a letter on Chris’ behalf. A few days later, the person who had owned it for the past 11 years contacted Chris.
“I never forgot about that car … Not a month went by when I didn’t look at a photo of it”
Another bout of nostalgia
The motor had at some stage given up the ghost, and the Super Minx had been parked in a carport ever since, covered with a tarp. The motor had been removed, and the tarp had trapped moisture on the bonnet, roof, and boot, blistering the paint. Chris wasn’t put off; he was in love again. He says that 14 years of nagging guilt were being washed away. “Not a month went by when I didn’t look at a photo of it,” he recalls. Chris soon discounted the option of finding a replacement motor. This was going to be a matching-numbers car. It even has its original registration plates, so the motor had to be rebuilt. With the car back in the family and work to do, Chris’ dad, a mechanic by trade, got involved, but Chris also put in the hours.
They had already decided that Geraldine, for her second stint in the family, should be reborn from a full bare-metal rebuild. Chris stripped the car in his garage. This prompted another bout of nostalgia when he came across an old newspaper clipping that had slipped between the seats: it contained a birth notice for one of his younger brothers.
Chris and his dad entrusted the shell to Lance Cleave at Abrasive Blasting and Coatings, an old-school craftsman, who, Chris says, really got involved with the project. The blistered paint had concealed some ‘spider rust’, so Chris opted for the replacement bonnet that the previous owner had already acquired, along with two doors from a donor car. There was some rot around the fuel filler to fix too. Chris and his dad also took the opportunity to fix at last a small dent in the right rear panel acquired during Chris’ grandmother’s ownership; it had always rankled with both of them.
Rooms smelling of solvents
Chris was a sales rep at the time and used to take bits of Geraldine with him on the road. He would spend his evenings sitting in his motel cleaning car parts, then spend the mornings looking innocent when motel owners asked why the room smelled of solvents. On the whole, they were relieved to discover that he had only been washing car parts.
Finding most bits for the Hillman wasn’t terribly difficult, thanks to Speedy Spares in the UK. While Chris wanted to keep as much of the car original as possible, he was happy to specify new rubber for radiator hoses, door and window seals, and the washer bottle. He also replaced the electric fuel pump with an original-spec mechanical model.
Chris stripped the dash and applied “many, many coats” of marine varnish. Dashboard Restorations remade the top, which had suffered the usual cracking. The carpets were not to the standard Chris wanted, so they were also remade. After some work with a toothbrush, the original vinyl seat coverings and door cards came up as good as new, partly due to their originally being made from durable Vynide material but also because his grandparents always had sheepskins on the (optional) separate front seats. Chris got a new set of those made too — another nod to the family heritage that added another thousand dollars to the bill.
The car is now resplendent in a rich, dark red. It’s as close to the original colour as they could make it. Jason at Universal Custom spent a lot of time getting the colour and finish to a high standard, while avoiding, at Chris’ insistence, making it look “too modern”.
Disagreement over suspension
The 1725cc motor came back together with the help of Tom Taylor of Taylor Automotive. After Chris discovered that his dad, on his own, had removed the gearbox from a donor car to get some clutch components, he tried to keep him away from heavy lifting, so he roped in his brother to help with installing the clutch, gearbox, and driveshaft, while his dad supervised. They had another small disagreement over the suspension. Chris decided to lower the car a little, add another leaf spring to stiffen the rear a bit and reset them, and add custom coils at the front. He had done something similar with his 403kw HSV GTS E3 — not that he’s going to hammer the 139-kilometre-per-hour-maximum Hillman (0–60mph [0–97kph] in 18 seconds) around a track or blast it down gravel roads.
“There’s no way I’m taking that on a gravel road,” he states.
His dad argued against the suspension changes, but, eventually, says Chris, he came round and admitted that the car looks the better for it. There are a couple of other personal touches that Chris couldn’t resist, but they are thoroughly in keeping with his devotion to the car’s history. The name ‘Geraldine’ is inscribed on the radiator shroud and on the glovebox, and the rear quarter-lights bear an inscription in loving memory of his grandparents, Nana Molly and Pop Bill.