The Creator of Mini Car

The Mini's creator, the late, great Sir Alec Issigonis, was a genius. Sir Alec Issigonis' Mini was launched on 26th August 1959, changing the face of the car industry forever. The Mini was entirely his work and not the work of a whole team as happens today. The world's favorite small car stayed in continuous production, largely unchanged, until the year 2000.

He designed the Mini to be a small, cheap, economic wee car with safe handling...little did he know that the car would go on for 40 historic years. It was a small cheap run-around in the time of a fuel crisis, a fashion icon in the sixties, and a legend on the race tracks of the world, having won the British and European Saloon car championships, and the celebrated Monte Carlo rally three times then back to being an economy car before finally ending up as an ultra-cool "retro" car for the 90s with a huge following from people of all ages.

He had a marvellous ability to visualise the completed car during its design stages. There are many examples of this, such as the one where an engineer asked him what size to make the wheels. Issigonis held his hands apart and said "this big"...the engineer measured the distance between his hands - 10 inches - and made the wheels exactly that size!

Casual sketches made my Issigonis could almost be used as blueprints by the engineers assembling the first prototypes. He called himself "The Ironmonger" because he preferred to be hands-on rather than paper-based. "Market research is bunk" he said..."the public don't know what they want, it is my job to tell them". with more than 5.25 million Minis produced, who can argue? Sir Alec designed many other successful cars including the legendary Morris Minor and Austin 1100/1300 range.