Tangled Metal wrote:Looking back on cars with modern eye and you will probably find very few cars are still as good as they were in their own time.
I've driven (and ridden) loads of the vehicles I'd lusted after back in the day and IMO they are without exception something better remembered with fondness than experienced, time hasn't been kind to them.
As for the design, be it the beetle, mini, fiat 500 then definitely you could make a better car if you weren't trying to make them resemble the old one but the reality is they're all still very good cars, just not quite as good as they could have been.
In the case of the mini the upright windscreen is the worst aspect. Increases wind noise and drag and thus reduces efficiency.
(Overall though imo they've done a fantastic job because they're all instantly recognisable whilst actually looking nothing like. A neat trick to pull off and to be able to do it requires a good eye of the kind I don't have.)
Oh - as for speed, the mini was pretty light. I had a ponced up 1100 that could sit on the tail of the then much venerated XR3's without much of a problem.
Easy cars to tune and engines that generally didn't explode when you did.