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.
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.
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.
