Saturday 26th October. Something different!

I've not done much work on either Triumph lately to be honest, my mind has been on house hunting and replacing my boring every day car, my Peugeot 205 diesel. Don't get me wrong, it's a great car and you can get around 60 mpg in them if driven sensibly. (Apparently!)

With the car hunting I still wanted something old(ish) but something that I can use every day, has good fuel consumption and I can also do other events in. Spares and parts availability needs to be good too so that if it does go off the road for any reason it can be repaired and put back into use pretty quickly.

After looking around at a few different options I decided the ideal car would be..........a Mini! A proper little Mini that is. Not the stupidly large German 'Mini'.

They have a great following, plenty of regional and local clubs and events and there's very little you can't buy for them.

So after looking at a number of them and weeding out the rot boxes a choice was made on a 1977 Metallic blue 850. Ideally I did want a 998cc model, but this car has a stage one tuning kit, Cooper front disc brakes, Koni shocks all round, but more importantly a very, very good solid shell. Anyone into Mini's will tell you it's better to have a good shell with the wrong engine, than the right engine with a crap shell.

It also has high lift rockers fitted, but there's no history with the car and the camshaft spec is unknown. I'm hoping it has an upgraded camshaft and that's why the high lift rockers were fitted, but who knows? It certainly flies along for an 850!

So, after some serious haggling, said Mini was collected and driven home from Chadwell Heath near Dagenham and I'm pleased to say it did so with no issues at all. It does appear that the stage one kit has been fitted, but then the carb hasn't been fine tuned to suit the new needle, so a rolling road session at Atspeed in Rayleigh is booked for Friday morning where this issue will be addressed.

Overall though it's a great little car and has the potential of being a super  fast buzz bomb! Watch this space! :)