Car killer or motoring magic?

JAMES May needs worry no more about the dubious title of Captain Slow, because I’ve nicked it.

The Southport and Ormskirk District Mini Owners’ Club have granted me the slightly suspicious honour because I’ve just completed their annual jaunt over some of Britain’s steepest mountain passes and managed to hold up a mass of souped-up Minis because I was driving so slowly in mine. Yet the fact I completed it all, I reckon, is incredible.

This is the very same Mini that just weeks ago let me down in spectacular fashion by deciding it’d had enough of being a car and wanted to become a Reliant Robin instead, and tried to shed one of its wheels at 40mph. You can probably understand that even though it’d taken many hours of someone else’s painstaking work just to get it up to the 2010 Lakes Tour, based on the shores of Ullswater in the Lake District, I was still taking it a tad cautiously.

As a drive it’s the sort of thing you’d think twice about taking any car on, but would you entrust a 200 mile drive over some of the country’s most challenging mountain passes to a car with a one litre engine, an automatic gearbox, drum brakes and a ropey reliability record?

From the cramped confines of an old car on a lashing, wet Cumbrian morning it’s hard to appreciate the scale of just what I’d asked the Life On Cars Mini to do, so here’s the route in its epic entirety:


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It’s a real car killer of a drive, as the occasional Mini from one of the many other clubs taking part proved as we spied them sulking at the side of the country lanes. From the twists and turns of the mountain pass out to Alston to the one-in-three cliff faces of the Hardknott Pass, it was a hellishly difficult thing to do.

Then there was the agonising moment when the temperature gauge shot up, the car slowed to crawling pace and steam starting swirling out from beneath the bonnet. As it would if you’re trying to take a Mini 1000 Automatic up the Hardknott Pass. It looked, sounded and smelt awful, but once we’d let it cool down and given it a taste of mountain spring water, it started going again. And just kept going.

The car almost everyone had doubted just kept on going, soldering on over everything the Lakes could throw at it. On a day mostly marked out by dark clouds and constant drizzle, it was a burst of sunshine, and just to prove it wasn’t a one-off it followed the 200 miles of climbing by getting me home as well.

It might have been slower than everything else there but it was motoring magic. You should try it sometime.

David Simister will be appearing on the Live From Studio One on Dune 107.9 FM next Friday (June 25) at 6pm to talk about Britain’s best driving roads