Erin Baker: The ultimate original Mini – DBA Mini Remastered

Using the same handcrafting techniques, the same company badges and design detail, David Brown has come up with his take on the Mini. 

It’s a great example of how not to ruin an “architectural icon” as he terms it, while tinkering enough with it that the result is significantly different, and special. Thus the new cars, while using reconditioned 1,275cc original engines and four-speed manual gearboxes, get all-new chassis and body panels, that have been “de-seamed” for a clean, perfectly smooth surface that curves round the edges of the cars. 

The rear lights are formed of three separate LED units, the from lights are an update on the classic, unless you go for the Cafe Racer or Monte Carlo trim variants, which have triple LED units at the front, fake but wonderfully made leather bonnet straps and a host of minor details which are very pleasing.

Best of all, the price: unlike the Speedback GT, of which they’ve built just 11 in two years, the Mini Remastered will be priced “south of six figures” and they expect to ramp production at their new Silverstone HQ up to 100 a year by next year.

Altogether, this sounds like a far more sensible proposition. David Brown has been quite canny though: while this Mini will open the doors to a whole new group of customers, for whom bespoke fun needs to be slightly more affordable, he has kept tightly to a family DBA design, with the same grill and enamel badges shared by the Mini and the Speedback. 

One senses a small but significant empire coming on, if the orders start flowing when this car is officially unveiled to the public at the end of the month in Monaco. 

“It was a challenge to stay true to the original”, David brown told me at the unveiling in hip Shoreditch. “It’s a great piece of engineering and design.” But the original was also a fantastic concept, poorly executed, and that’s where DBA comes in, rejigging and reconditioning, using better-quality bolts and small parts where preferable. Of course, some fans will simply hate it that their baby has been messed with, but I think maybe DBA has cracked it this time.