Move away from the vehicle Mr Cooper !

Italian Job Breakdown

Imagine you’ve broken down at the bottom of the Simplon Pass on the homeward journey of the Italian Job Charity Tour, and you’re still over 1,000 miles from home. You’re lucky in that you have managed to pull into a small car park on the side of the road where little patches of tarmac form a pretty pattern on an otherwise heavily pitted and seriously uneven surface.

You’ve had to coast in because you’ve conked out on the way down!  The stunning views you enjoyed moments before on the descent from one of Europe’s most breathtaking mountain passes is now but a distant memory. Your thoughts turn to the pressing matter in hand:  Your broken Mini.

In typical Mini fashion, it’s not long before hordes of fellow ‘Jobbers’ begin piling into the car park, drawn by the sight of a raised Mini bonnet yet unaware until now of the seriously uneven surface of the car park. A group head-scratching session begins almost as soon as the Jobbers alight from their still moving cars, such is their anxiety to lend assistance.
Quickly, the space beneath the bonnet and just above the engine of the disabled Mini fills with eager, gazing eyes belonging to nodding heads. With so many heads you know there’ll be many different opinions.

“You’re carbs are frozen!”     “It’ll be that cheap Italian fuel.”  The ubiquitous ‘head gasket’ and the classic ‘wait for the service crew, they’ll be along in a while’ solutions are bandied about.

A crowd now begins to form around the ailing vehicle and the huddle beneath the bonnet. Cigarettes are lit and talk soon turns to the difficulties of hiring a car in Switzerland when all of a sudden, the closely huddled crowd of people begins to separate and form a clear path, upon which is striding a man with a purpose, a man with knowledge above all others, a man whose father and thus he are inextricably linked with the Mini, a man with the technical ability to accurately diagnose the problem in one swift glance, a man who among all others should surely know precisely why this lovely little Mini is presently out of action.

That man is Mike Cooper, a fellow participant on the Italian Job and all round know-it-all about Minis.

As he approaches the car, he bends his knees to assume the ‘Mini squat’, pokes his head over the engine, fills his lungs with a sharp intake of air and is about to convey his judgement, when, out of nowhere, the massive frame of  Italian Job regular Big Jim Thompson appears, pokes Mike Cooper on the arm and says in his delightful Glaswegian accent, “Move away from the Vehicle Mr. Cooper. Probably best to leave this one to the experts, eh?”  With that Mike, Big Jim and the rest of us just laughed and laughed.

It reminds me, though, just how much fun we all have on the Italian Job in the company of like-minded Mini-
loving friends who no matter what the difficulty, problem, drama or situation, always find time to help one another and make sure that at the end of it we’re all laughing.