Mini found groove as a race car

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The car had become a must-have for the trendy, jet-setters of the Swinging ’60s.

It didn’t hurt that the Mini was also an instant success as a race car, becoming the first British auto to win the European Rally championship and taking the checkered flag three times between 1964 and ’67 at the Monte Carlo Rally, which was run in the winter. Legendary Austrian racer Nicki Lauda drove a Mini to his first competition victory, as did Graham Hill and Ken Tyrell.

In 1969, the Mini gained an even bigger cult following with the release of the movie The Italian Job (which starred Michael Caine and Noel Coward), when the little red, white and blue cars zoomed through the streets of Turin at death-defying speeds in a daring escape sequence in which robbers fled with a stash of gold bullion.

By the early 1970s, Cooper’s association with the Mini was over. BMC had morphed into British Ley- hard at work adjusting the bottom line. The Cooper name was dropped in an effort to save a few quid.

In 1990, Rover, which then owned the marque, made a valiant effort to re-launch the Mini Cooper and it continued production until October 2000 with little success. An era had come to a close, punctuated by the death of Cooper on Christmas Eve that year.

Playing on the history of the Mini, BMW secured the rights to both it and the Cooper name and the many of the same styling cues and engineering principles that made the original such a hit.