MARKET FORCES
It was the year of the Spice Girls, topping the charts and pushing Britpop into second place. It was the year that Terry Venables took England to the semi finals of the Euros and Gareth Southgate missed that penalty. TFI Friday arrived on the telly and science fiction became science fact when Dolly the sheep was the first mammal to be cloned. And 1996 was the year that Mini Magazine arrived on the newsagents’ shelves…
“It’s been the specialists who have stepped into the breach”
So many of those events now feel like ancient history, but, for those of us who work on the magazine at least, those two and a half decades have passed in a blink. And as we put the magazine together each month, it’s easy to forget how much has changed within our scene in that time. As we worked towards the launch, we had lengthy discussions with the team at Rover responsible for the Mini. The car was still merrily rolling off the production lines, the relaunch of the ‘mainstream’ Cooper had been a huge success just six short years earlier, the addition of fuel injection had increased the Mini’s appeal just four years previously, and little did we know as we dreamed up those early issues, there was more to come. The twin point injection Minis, the Sport Pack and the launch upmarket with luxurious trim and price tags to match were mere months away.
In retrospect, it doesn’t feel like we’d really got into our stride when Rover was sold to the Phoenix Consortium by BMW in 2000, who had owned the firm since 1994. They took the almost market ready MINI with them. Mini production ceased the following year.
We all knew the end of production was coming. The twin point cars had given the Mini a few more years,
