Juliette Wirtz and her husband Jim (sorry, Jim, we don't have a photograph of you) are keen rally enthusiasts and are prominent members of the Luxembourg Mini Club (Mighty Mini Frėnn). They also act as agents for us and will liaise with customers from continental Europe and assist with the logistics of car preparation when our linguistic skills fail....! Juliette and Jim will be happy to discuss your project and co-ordinate with us as necessary.

  They can be reached by phone:

Geoff O'Nion & Nigel Hutchinson are regular competitors in a all kinds of marathon events all over Europe. You may have spotted their Morris Mini Cooper Mk 1 on Sky Sports recently as 'World Motor Sport' featured the 2002 Classic Marathon. Geoff and Nigel have just completed the HERO Winter Trial from Maastrichts to Monte-Carlo. Geoff reports: 

"This was quite a hard rally with two night loops, one on Tuesday and the other on the last night upon reaching Monaco. We were around 12th overall and second in class (cars up to 1600cc), for most of the rally and this is how we started out on the final night loop in horrendous storm conditions. Eventually half the night section was cancelled due to fog and snow,

however, the very last regularity was fast with a very clever catch on the last junction, it caught most people out, some more than others. We lost 3 minutes on indecision, but still went up to finish 9th overall, however, the others in our class were not caught out quite so badly and we dropped to 3rd in our class. In all we were very pleased with the result and with an added bonus of winning the marque team prize (Prices Prodigies BMC) with the Appleton's in their Mini Cooper S and Roger Byford and Willy Cave in a MGB GT. As for the car, I feel that you may have done too good a job on putting this car together as it ran to perfection and seems to get better every rally. We had no mechanical issue and the only intervention on the rally was an electric fault which was attributed to a poor connection on an in line fuse I installed." 

" Again my utmost thanks on a superbly prepared car the performance of which is credit to your workmanship"

Recently we have had some great projects in our workshop. Edgar Diaz from Montgomery, Alabama, asked us to undertake a nut and bolt restoration of a 1963 Cooper.

Edgar asked us to get 100+ bhp out of this motor. This objective was always going to be difficult to achieve given the 92 octane fuel prevalent in North America but  we did our best although we would guarantee only 85bhp!  Bill built a 1380cc engine but with slight adjustments to allow for the lower octane fuel, the To our (slight) surprise and Edgar's delight the engine delivered 120bhp "at the wheels" at Peter Baldwin's rolling road.  

The lower photo shows the heart of the matter - here is the engine bay which we think looks very nice and traditional despite being a few cubic centimetres bigger than John Cooper originally intended for this model! From the upper photo you can see all the effort that's been put into restoring the interior to the original Cooper specification.