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“I don’t like the modifications to shout at you. Less is more.”

Mark Deakin was only 14 when he bought his first Mini. “It was a genuine Mk1 Mini Cooper. I bought it as a restoration project. I’m the youngest, with five brothers who are all into cars and motorbikes, so my passion came from them. One brother had a Mk1 Mini and it was a car I always liked. During school I wanted to do a bit of a project. A Mini came up in the local paper, a genuine Mini Cooper Mk1 in Island Blue with a Snowberry White roof.”

Sadly, once Mark started to work on it, it became apparent that it was too much for a novice to take on. “It was rotten. I ended up buying another bodyshell and basically spent the next few years building my Mini into it. I passed my driving test and that was my first car.” A friend of one of Mark’s brothers was into Minis and rebuilt a Mk1 Cooper S which inspired him further. “It was beautiful and I loved it. I used to see it when I came home from school and I’d think: ‘I need to do one of those one day’. That was where my passion for Minis truly started.”

To date Mark has owned