18 New Zealand Classic Car | themotorhood.com
C
hris Steele can almost remember the
excitement when his father phoned his
grandmother one day and said, “You
have to come and look at this car!”
His father was the service manager
for a Rootes Group agency, and someone had brought
in a one-year-old 1966 Hillman Super Minx with
2700 miles on it as a trade-in. It was quite a step up
from his grandad’s Austin A40.
“On the same day, they drove away in it,” says Chris.
He doesn’t really actually remember the occasion, as
he wasn’t even born then, but the car has been such
a constant in his life, and the story has been told so
often, that it’s almost as if he remembers being there.
You can imagine the excitement. Compared with
an A40; the similar-sized Austin Cambridge; and,
especially, the Minx, which was still being sold
alongside the Super Minx at the time, the new car
would have seemed very modern.
The standard Audax-body Minx had smaller windows
and a slightly claustrophobic interior, resulting from
its rather hunched shape. The straight lines of the
Super Minx, the acres of space inside, and its airy
glasshouse — especially this later model, with its
six-light design — would have been a revelation. It
also had a wooden dashboard, just like the upmarket
Triumphs, Rovers, and Jags.Nana’s ring marks on the steering wheel
Chris Steele’s grandmother owned the Mark IV
Super Minx from 1967 through to 2000, kept it garaged
every night, and kept detailed notes of everything done
to the car, in tiny writing in tiny notebooks. In one of
them, she recorded that she had paid £1165 for it.
“If the car got rained on, it was always dried down,”
says Chris.
This attention to the details is clearly in the genes.
When restoring the car, Chris sourced, among many
other parts, a mint-condition steering wheel, but it’s still
in its packaging. The one in the car bears the scars of his
grandmother’s rings.
“I’ve got a near-concours-condition wheel, but I
couldn’t bear to change it,” Chris explains. “It’s a
special feeling that comes from knowing [that] that’s
the same wheel they held.”
The car carries another memento, this one from Chris’
grandfather. The Super Minx had come with a smallWhenever he saw a Hillman Super Minx
in red with a white flash, he’d be looking
for the plate or other clues to see if it
was Nana’s old ‘Geraldine’