Description:

1992 Austin Mini FIA Sprint & Hill Climb Car ‘The Child’

The Child is still road legal.

An Austin Mini first registered in May 1992; the car started life as a bog standard Mini City E. It had had a hard life, so we decided it needed to be special.

We took it apart to the bare bones and had the entire body dipped at Surface Process Limited to remove all the paint and reveal what was left of the body.

To our amazement we only had to replace the bulk head and front screen. The floor pan was not too bad, but we wanted a solid base so we decided to replace this with a completely new floor pan plus brand new cills on both sides.

The panels are original, made in Coventry, and are not the aftermarket replicas that often do not fit. When all the welding had been done and all the other parts had been ordered, a roll cage from ‘Rollcentre Racing’ was fitted and the car was shipped off to our paint shop. There it was sanded and massaged to its ultimate smoothness and painted in a rich pageant blue

To keep the car as light as possible we added carbon fibre wheel arches, boot, bonnet, front/rear bumpers and front grill. Additionally we replaced the doors with aluminium doors to make it even lighter.

The engine was sent to Keith Calver of ‘Calver Special Tuning Ltd’, with a selection of the best parts from ‘Specialist Components of Carlton Road Norfolk’. The specifications are all included in the build sheet attached. The management system is a ‘Specialist Components’ standalone ‘Typhoon ll ECU’ linked to an ‘ETB DigiDash 2 Lite’ and a rev counter.  

The engine sits in a Miglia front sub frame alongside a KAD rear suspension beam. A Spax kit RSX519 with rebound and dampening adjustment was used, with a coil over kit for the suspension and a ‘KAD front adjustable anti-roll bar’. Suspension geometry kits for both front and rear from ‘Minispares’ were fitted.

The gear box is a ‘Super Mighty Mini gear box’ from ‘Guessworks®’. KAD supplied the Alloy Race fly wheel and back plate, the clutch being an AP 4 paddle sintered Heavy duty race Clutch

It comes with a brand new left hand drive ‘Quickrack Steering rack’ (not fitted), mini light alloys fitted with brand new Yokahama 13” A539 road tyres. Also with 10” Force Racing Alloys with Racing Slicks. Fire Extinguisher with engine bay tubes.

After all this the car is just 600Kg with an engine of 1342cc delivering 130BHP and is simply something special both as a road legal car (UK) an FIA approved race car with an MSA competition log book.

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