John Player Special

There it was, smugly parked on the MoT bay rollers – a gleaming little Mini in full John Player Special livery. Black and gold, twin carbs jutting out like elbows in a bar fight, and decals hollering "CHAMPION!" like it had just pole-positioned at Brands. It had no right looking that good. I half expected Emerson Fittipaldi to emerge from the driver’s seat, flicking ash off a Gitane and asking for a spanner and a whisky. It even made the bloke in cargo shorts look like part of the pit crew.

And it brought it all back.

On migrating from Lambretta scooters to cars, my first car was a Mini. Well – mostly. It had the rigidity of a Rich Tea biscuit and the aesthetic charm of a wheelie bin after Bonfire Night. But I was a student with a panel beater mate and the blind optimism of youth. Together we reanimated it with pop-riveted Dulux tins for the rear end, a fibreglass flip-front that flapped in crosswinds, and enough filler to qualify as a Grade II listed renovation. We brush-painted it Lime Green and Black, and christened it – without irony – the LGB GT, years before that came to signify rainbows and human dignity, rather than gloss, grit, and gaffer tape.

It was a marvel of bodged ambition. The brakes were theoretical. The dashboard had the ergonomic flow of a council bin. But it was mine. And it moved under its own power. And in a dim light – viewed from a considerable distance – it looked like it might once have been fast.

Then came the phone call. I was away at nautical college. “I’ve bought you a car,” said my mother, with theatrical pause. “It’s a Mini – but not a Mini.”

And that was all it took. My brain shifted into fifth. Mini Marcos? Something wedge-shaped and fibreglass? Some obscure rally special with a roll cage and no insurance category? I was practically signing autographs in my head.

Then I saw it.

A Wolseley Hornet.

Now, a Hornet is technically a Mini. But only in the same way that a bishop is technically a man. It had a pretentious little grille – a moustachioed smirk in chrome – and a rear end like it was moonlighting as a tea caddy. It came with leather seats and a walnut dashboard, as if hoping to distract you from the fact that it still had an 848cc engine and the turning circle of a shopping trolley with three locked wheels. It was a Mini that had married well and now dressed for dinner.

Still, I was nothing if not deluded. So I did what any ambitious adolescent would: I gave it the full John Player Special fantasy. Black paint, gold pinstripes, hand-rendered JPS logos done with a shaky hand and a half-dry brush. The result was a visual lie. It looked like it might once have been involved in motorsport. What it was actually involved in was a lot of apologetic lane changing and mechanical sympathy.

And then it died.

Spectacularly.

I was on a radar course in Liverpool docks – the sort of setting that makes everything feel like it’s about to go horribly wrong. It had been raining, obviously. I approached a puddle, confidently assuming it was the usual Merseyside surface damp – an inch or two at most. At 30mph, I hit it square on.

Except it wasn’t a puddle. It was a crater. One front wheel vanished into the abyss and the sump smacked down onto a submerged grid with all the grace of a piano falling down a lift shaft. The engine mounts sheared instantly. The engine rotated – literally – a full 180 degrees, like it was trying to crawl back into the gearbox and forget the whole thing had happened. Every panel buckled. It was, mechanically and emotionally, a write-off.

Enter my elder brother – ten years older, infinitely more capable, and based in West Kirby. He came to the rescue like a maritime salvage crew, arriving with a tow rope and that fraternal expression which says “I told you not to trust that carburettor.” While crouched under the front attaching the rope, he noticed his expensive watch flapping about, so he took it off and laid it carefully to one side.

And there it remained.

We drove off with the wreck in tow – and his watch left behind, presumably glinting mournfully in a puddle outside the docks until some scouser spotted it and thought Christmas had come early. My name, in the van, was mud. Possibly something worse.

That was the end of the Hornet. A walnut dash and leather seats couldn’t save it. Nothing could. It had gone out not with a bang, but with a subterranean clank and a furious brother.

And yet... I mourned it.

Because you don’t choose your early cars. They happen to you – like glandular fever or unwise crushes. And no matter how absurd they are, no matter how bustled or buckled, they stay with you.

So yes, seeing that JPS-liveried Mini stirred something. Nostalgia, yes – but also a knowing wince. Because real Minis – twitchy, leaky, glorious little lunatics – still rule the tarmac in our memories.

Even if mine once swivelled its own engine like a possessed Lazy Susan, and the one before it was made of Dulux, filler, and blind optimism – and even if I still owe my brother a bloody watch.