A Game Of Two Halves

Three friends head out of deepest South Yorkshire to see how the Midland’s made cars in 2009.

Image: Birmingham Post

On the 18th January 2008, Tata Motors purchased two illustrious British car brands from Ford, in the process establishing Jaguar Land Rover, aka JLR . Your author, along with many of our readership will no doubt remember the motoring magazines introducing this new Jaguar dawn, fresh with Indian money. At the time of our trip to the West Bromwich plant, the factory produced both XF and XJ models, considered by the press to be something of a relaunch for the Leaping Cat’s fortunes and capable of bloodying their German rivals’ noses.

Our November dawn was leaden, with heavy traffic heading south. As memory serves, we paid nothing for the privilege of the tour. Having registered our names sometime earlier, we were ticked off in school register fashion and like good school children wore our high visibility jackets and protective goggles without question. Informed the plant could be noisy, no ear defenders were proffered but we were told to Continue reading “A Game Of Two Halves”

Anniversary Waltz 2000 – New Millennial MINI. 

Sputnik Falls, MINI rises.

“What do you mean ‘what dome’? And you call yourself a location scout?”  The 2000 Mini range. (c) thelastminis

It seemed for a time that it would simply go on indefinitely, but in 2000, after 41 years, time’s irresistible march finally caught up and Sputnik came home. The last years of Mini production saw it become something of a tribute act, with a bewildering array of special editions being offered, (mainly for Japanese consumption) culminating in the wide-tracked Cooper Sport 500, an example of which being the very last Mini built, leaving the Longbridge tracks on October 4th that year.

The advent of the new millennium was greeted with lurid fireworks along the Thames and thousands queuing to be underwhelmed by Mr. Mandelson’s Millennium Experience in Greenwich, but it wasn’t just Mini that sputtered and popped that year, so too the unhappy BMW-Rover alliance. Unravelling for some time, the Vierzylinder officially announced plans to Continue reading “Anniversary Waltz 2000 – New Millennial MINI. “