IT was a safety overload with the 1997 Mini Classic, as Rover’s brochure explained.
Standard kit? Driver’s airbag. Seatbelt pretensioners. Side intrusion beams. Headlamp leveling switch (if only the hydra cars had’ve had this…). Sir Alec would have been blown away.
But it wasn’t short on gadgets, either. Twinpoint fuel injection (yes, Tibbles, with chips)? Anti-theft alarm? Coded stereo? All were standard. And while there was no air con, there was the ferocious development of a twin-speed fan. In all things holy…
Rover certainly kept mentioning then, too… all through the brochure. Many times over.
Indeed, you had to bury far deeper to discover other features, such as gauges for oil temperature, battery and volts. The famed brake circuit test button. Gorgeous tweed seat trim as standard.
Never before had the Mini offered so many paint colours either, said Rover. There were ‘Classic’ paint colours. There were regular colours. There were new colours, which still look staggering today:
•   Amarath: pearlescent purple flip
•   Volcano: orange
•   Kingfisher: blue
My favourites, picked from the huge range, took me a good half-hour to choose. In the end, I nailed it down to three:
•   Platinum Silver
•   Yukon Grey
•   Whitehall Beige
I mused and I mused… in the end, Platinum Silver won. As you can see, it’s perfect. But, interior? Options? That’s another matter (and blog) entirely…
Can you help me buy a Mini in 2009?
Mini brochure makes fascinating reading
