Prototype Minors

[ErnstBlofeld]

A couple of things...

Read recently that none other than WO Bentley was a huge admirer of the Minor, and conceived a high performance flat four for it off his own bat. Anyone know anything more about this?

And then on another forum somebody's mentioned that there were quite a few proposals for a replacement Minor, and that Issigonis himself experimented with a Riley 2.4 litre engine in a restyled Minor shell at some time circa 1951.

And then there are some mystery project codes: DO976 and the DO1058.

Can anyone shed any light on these mystery Minors?

[mike.perry]

Paul Skilleter's "Morris Minor, The World's Supreme Small Car" lists all the factory pre production and prototype Morris Minors.
Probably out of print

[dunketh]

Would love to see/know more about this sort of thing too.

I've read countless times about the FWD prototype that either did or did not have some experimental mini-style rubbber suspension amongst other changes.
One wanders what happened to these prototypes... there must surely have been loads about back in the day, trying out new ideas etc...

[ErnstBlofeld]

The FWD Minor was registered TFC 717 IIRC. Rob Golding in his Mini book states it had a transverse engine and an end-on gearbox, rather than the later in-sump transmission arrangement of Issigonis' later FWD production cars.

Anyhow, think it's been mentioned on here before but Morris Motors and then BMC just did not know what a belting car the Minor was and could have done more to sell the car - especially in the US. Over the pond they let the Beetle have a free run, and if they'd only bothered the could have sold many more Minors than a measly 1.6 million.

Remember an anecdote about Morris in the US. About a chap from Morris Motors being quite confident that the car had enough poke to get up a steep hill in San Francisco, only for him to eat his words when the poor car ran out of puff. Think this must have been in the early Morris Motors days when the car was equipped with the 918cc sidevalve unit. At the same time the company was selling the MG TC in the US with its 1250cc OHV XPAG engine.

See what I'm thinking: did they ever consider plumbing the XPAG into the Minor? I mean if Issigonis toyed with the idea of shoehorning in a Riley 2.4 twin cam engine, they must have considered it, mustn't they? Would have made sense for the US - using the same engine as the MG would have meant not having to stock bits for two different engines - and the extra poke might have meant fewer of our American friends turning to Mr Hitler's VW.

[mike.perry]

The 918 UPHM Wolseley OHV engine was under development when Austin took over and imposed the 803 A Series