Heard of it? I just remembered a conversation I had with Phil Wicks at one of his MINI driving events. He and (I can't remember who or how many) were driving Minis in the Targa Florio in the early '60s. He said they were used to being passed like they were standing still on straight sections by high powered cars but at one point a Mini flew by him that was easily pacing a Ferrari! Turned out to be a Twini or Twin Mini. He said the thing went like a bat out of hell but had to keep stopping because it burned through tires...etc. 1,600 pounds and 178 hp - all wheel drive. There's a good story here. More pics here.
Remember him telling that story too and had intended to research it and forgot.. Thanks for the pics and link, pretty cool stuff for it's day!!!!
Hmmm, wonder if we were at the same event (I was at VIR) or maybe he just tells that story all the time. It was probably one of his stories used to help illustrate some point in one of the "classroom" sessions...power vs balance or some such.
Twini During one of the two tours in England I had with our Air Force, I was at a meeting that John Cooper was the guest of honor. In the after dinner speech he related how he helped in the development of the Twini Mini. He said he was convinced that it would have been the ultimate rally car. He also told us he personally halted its development after an accident at high speed, I believe, in a roundabout in northern London, where a lockup of one of the drive trains occurred and he rolled the car. The accident put him in the hospital for a long time with slow recovery. I attended a Mini show at Beaulieu one year and one of the members of the Mini Cooper Registry built a beautiful replica of the Twini. At the show the car was purchased and immediately disappeared to Japan according to what I heard. Paul
I actually saw a moke at a musuem in England a couple years ago that had twin engines in it. Pretty interesting how they made it work.
They actually did the twin engined Moke first (don't know why) and that was the inspiration for the Twini.
Agreed. And they did it with the idea that the British Army might be interested in a light four-wheel drive vehicle - apparently they didn't think the Army would object to the negligible ground clearance on the Moke... When I was a kid, there was an annual televised race meeting between the Army and the London Motor Club, largely for the amusement of the TV viewers I suspect, as they had very odd contests like between a tank and an E-Type Jaguar - the tank just set its compass and drove through the trees cross-country while the E-Type went hareing the long way round the roads. The Twini Moke appeared in that contest and was superb on smooth low-grip surfaces like mud. It had a second throttle pedal to the left of the clutch pedal which allowed the driver to apply more power to the rear engine and so could do impressive tail slides on demand. Andrew I've found some links - both of which suggest that my memory of an extra throttle pedal is wrong, at least on the one remaining prototype: http://www.austinmemories.com/page48/page48.html (a third of the way down) http://www.4wdonline.com/ClassicCars/Moke2.html