Mini 40 & Mini Cooper 40th edition Page

During 1999 to celebrate the Mini's 40th year of production, a series of limited edition Minis were produced under the Mini 40 name. There were 800 such cars produced, confirmed 250 for the UK market, plus there are believed to be 150 for the Japanese market (JDM cars) and 400 left hand drive European export market cars.

The UK cars were officially numbered from 1 to 250 when built and came with a presenation case and a certifcate with the unique number stated. There were 150 made in Mulberry Red, 50 in Old English White and 50 in Island Blue.

These cars all came with the sports pack flared wheel arches and 13" sports alloys and with either Red or Dark Blue leather trim, polished alloy door furniture and turned-alloy fascia with a Mini 40 branded instrument cluster.

The JDM cars were also produced in the same three colours as the UK range, but these came with 12" Alloys and were not Sports Pack fitted. It is beleived around 150 were made, but this is yet to be confirmed and the breakdown of colours made in numbers is also not known at this time. As usual, the JDM cars were equipped with air-coniditoning and were available in manual or automatic transmission with the Single Point Injection being retained but mated to an MPi engine block and other ancillaries as per other MPi era JDM cars.

The left hand drive export models for Europe came in a wider range of colours, Black, Platinum Silver for non-sunroof fitted cars, or British Racing Green or Tahiti Blue for the 'Open' edition which came with the full length canvas sunroof. It it beleived around 400 of these were produced, some in Sports Pack trim and others not. Numbers of colours produced and spefciic variations are still not fully known at this time.

Later in 1999, a further model was built for the JDM market called the Mini Cooper 40th Anniversary edition, and this came in different colours with a White roof and can be identifed by VIN number as a Cooper Variant (SAXXNN) rather than a Mini variant for all the other 40's (SAXXNW)

A register of these cars was started a few years ago by Chas Wright, but he has recently handed over the data to us to carry on with the building up of information and knowledge on these cars.

We have positively identified 247 of the UK cars, and the remaining cars are narrowed down to a small number of possibilites, and using data from owners of these cars, we have been able to deduce the UK car numbering as it does appear they were logically numbered in build order represented by the chassis numbers lowest to highest. We can therefore with good certainty number the cars for those who are unlucky not to have the original presentation case and letter within.

If you own any of the Mini 40 versions discussed above, we would love to hear from you and build up the register further with the aim to find all of them over time.

Hopefully coming in 2023 will be a dedicated Website for the Mini 40 cars, which will be linked here once this is launched.

We also plan to have a few Mini 40 club stands at some events. Please join the Mini 40 Facebook group to keep up to date on developments. https://www.facebook.com/groups/727679821275995