Restored for Life

Bert van Leeuwen restored his Mk1 Cooper S when he was a teenager. Nearly 20 years later he still owns it and we doubt that he’ll ever be able to part with it.

- Rob Hawkins.

Many of us roll our eyes at the thought of cars we’ve owned, scrapped or given away, which have now become classics and are worth considerably more than they used to be. The current boom in the classic car market has resulted in just about anything associated with Mini being desirable, collectable and valuable. Anything associated with John Cooper is out of the price range of many of us and even a humble Mayfair is now well worth preserving or restoring.

The Mk1 Cooper S seen here is one of those unattainable Minis but this wasn’t the case back in 1999 when 14-year-old Bert van Leeuwen spotted it as a bare, but restored, body shell. It was the ideal project at the time for the teenager, who was keen to get stuck into restoring a Mini for himself. He had luckily been brought up on Minis thanks to the family business in the Netherlands, Ben van Leeuwen Mini Centre, which was founded by his father in 1979.

The bare body shell sported all the traits of a Cooper S, including the correct hole in the transmission tunnel for the remote gear lever, mounting brackets for a boot board and the fittings for a right-hand petrol tank. It came with a Heritage certificate that confirmed it was a Cooper S with a build date of 13 June 1967, finished in Old English White with a black roof and a red and gold/ grey interior. It was originally a UK Mini with the steering on the right side, and was first registered by BMC dealer Caffyns of Brighton. The person who owned it before Bert imported it from the UK to the Netherlands, started to restore the body shell but had converted the steering over to left-hand drive.