The Mini Remastered: an £80,000 reboot of a motoring icon

The story behind David Brown Automotive’s £80,000 retake on a motoring icon
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“I had two heroes in my life,” says David Brown, the man behind Mini Remastered. “Roger Daltry, and my Dad. Daltry because I love rock music; my father because he taught me everything. He’d talk a lot about the Mini. He reckoned it was a superbly engineered machine that was never made well. Maybe I’m compensating for that now.”

Given that Brown’s idea to build modernised, customised, classic Issigonis Minis attracted 650 serious inquiries on the day of the announcement – a number that now stands at well over 2000 – ‘compensating’ might be understating it a bit.

These figures are some way beyond the original Mini Remastered plan, which was to make about 100 cars a year, eventually settling down to around 250, with first deliveries by November 2017. For comparison, almost 5.4m Minis were built over 41 years. But with the phone now ringing all the time, David Brown Automotive’s minuscule sales team has had to start taking £2000 deposits from desperate would-be buyers.

Brown describes the response as “brilliant” – but should it be such a big surprise, given the amount of love that clearly still exists for the first and, to some, only Mini? Brown’s own Mini experience included owning one as a youth, and then (along with most other owners) struggling to improve it. Remastered gives him the thrill of being able to remanufacture, to a fine level of detail, a car that was sketchily put together when new.

“Remastering and improving a famous British car seemed the most appealing idea,” he says. “There were some other candidates, such as the E-type, but the Mini appealed most of all.”

Officially, DBA is refurbishing Minis, not making new ones. That gets around the potential copyright difficulties that have plagued other ‘revival’ projects. DBA starts off with existing cars and gets new shells from British Motor Heritage before commencing the long and painstaking job of prepping and de-seaming them.

The ugly roof gutters are knocked back, and the nasty diagonal seams on the rear flanks removed entirely. The boot lid is opened electronically so needs no external handle. The suspension is a rubber system that was picked after a lengthy evaluation programme. Each car receives a 1275cc engine, along with as much original equipment as may be relevant to the model.

Three prototypes have been created to demonstrate likely themes: Monte Carlo (luxury), Club Sport (more basic) and Classic (traditional). Of course, they resemble original Issigonis Minis, and have identical dimensions, but the standards of fit and equipment are considerably higher than in the old factory days at Austin-Morris, BL, Leyland Cars and BLMC.

The redesigned dashboard looks just right, while somehow managing to incorporate many luxury items that were never part of the Mini concept, like air-con, sat-nav, Bluetooth capability, hifi, four dashboard eyeball vents, and electric (rather than manually sliding) windows. There’s even a starter button between the seats, as per the early cars.

Fanatical perfectionism means that the assembly process takes 1400 hours, 400 of them just for paint. The leather and Alcantara cabin has a professional look to it. In terms of quality, the finished item could easily have come off a Porsche line.

Unsurprisingly, this level of craftsmanship doesn’t come cheap. The first Minis from the late 1950s cost under £500 each. The DBA ones will range from £75,000 to £85,000 each, before local taxes.

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