The first Mini Cooper ‘S’ to win an international rally, it came into Whizzo’s possession in a most peculiar way.
A non-fault road accident in 1963 hospitalised him and it was when he was recuperating that he heard about the new 1071cc Cooper ‘S’ which he promptly ordered, because there was a six-month waiting list; 120 MNP arrived three weeks later.
“When it arrived I couldn’t pay for it, but I got it on HP, and it was much better than the Cooper because it had brakes,” he later recalled.
He entered the international Welsh Rally in it, saying of his experience that: “Our service crew were at a wedding all day Saturday and turned up in the middle of the night in darkest Wales to service us in tailcoats and top hats.
“It was very wet, very foggy, very nasty, and at the finish, we got very drunk, and then somebody said, you've won it. We'd passed all the works teams in the fog and we'd won our first International.”
Whizzo campaigned the Mini in ’64 and ’65 on rallies across the UK, plus Geneva and Switzerland, before selling it to a friend, who then sold it to another.
He eventually tracked it down and bought it back, with the intention of returning it to its 1964 Welsh Rally spec – in addition, it now has a rollcage, and updated seats and belts. Until his passing, he still loved to drive it and it comes to auction with a £60-80,000 estimate.
There’s also Whizzo’s 1972 Lancia Fulvia HF 1600. Restored by a previous owner over approximately a four-year period, it’s sold with an invoice from historic motorsport specialist INRacing for £6679 of work – and according to HPI it went from being white to red in 2017.
