Indeed so. I still think in many ways they were a better car than the Mini. I had a succession of MG1100/1300. THey were far quicker than people realised. Anyway, this particular model filmed is very rare now.
I never bought into this fetish about the Mini being a ground breaking car. It did nothing that had not already been done. BMC lost over £40 on each one they made, so it sold under price for its first few years and cstruggled to make its profit. They got the design wrong, hasty refresh to bodge up the probs, like the prior Minor, which had two inches width added while the designer wasn't looking. Was Issigionis that clever? He refused to have the Mini raced and was against the idea. The promised suspension did not work when it finally got fitted, so was removed again, having bogged up potentially the best of the breed. To the extent many cars had the suspension changed to make it work, on the botch Moulton system, hastily now made permanent. Moulton and Cooper were chucked down the road for offering to improve designs, quality and sales after making the car work.
The saving grace was it handled very well and the engine was already being tuned before the Mini appeared, see giant killing by A35s, so making motorsport possible. To the notice of the in crowd that was very much attached to motorsport, money and music thus gave it a sheek image rather in spite of, rather than because of, BMC management. BL later refused to take the car further and fobbed the world off with the 1275GT, closing Innocenti down. Experiments with bigger wheels failed badly, and bloody things never had brakes to match the performance you could get out of the engines. I know. I have had about every Mini thing that was made and crashed 9 of them when I was young and wild. The car is a wonderful base to build a great car, but what the factory offered was never really the car it could have been. So not a 2CV or a Ludvinka/Porsche that developed into a ground breaking car of the world in my book. Just a great car by mistake. Queue upset arguments.
