Having fun with Mr. Bean & his Mini has been a long-standing tradition for us at Mini Mania! This weekend the fun continues with the Racine Family taking over the driving duties of the famous Mr. Bean racing Mini as built by Mike Spangler and the San Diego Mini Owners club.
As if merely entering this Mini in this kind of race is not pretentious enough (when you compare it to the size of it's competitors), our Mr. Bean Mini only has a 998cc motor! Will it be a better motor for such an endurance race?!!
Great fun for all! More pictures and stories to come!

More pics

The first runs were as we raced the car at Buttonwillow-- about 51hp with a 123 dizzy in it (because we fried the lumenition that was in our regular dizzy) and an odd needle/jet setup because we had carb adjustment issues. It was bog rich down low then leaned out massively up top-- about 14.5-15 A/F ratio at WOT from about 4500rpms up to 6Kish. Probably only reason we didn't burn anything up at the track was because we were running a mix of 110 race fuel in with the 91 pump gas-- about a 30% mix of race gas, if I remember.

First I put the regular dizzy in it with a pertronix setup (no vaccum hooked up) and timed it in and ended up with the same HP as the 123 (but timing jumped around more under the timing light check). Played around with different needles I had, but was not getting any positive results or the results I expected from the needle changes-- the profile just pretty much kept looking the same. Ended up just putting the original needle back in it (BDL), leaning the whole thing out as much as the jet would allow (nearly up to the bridge) and then filing the last 3rd of the needle or so to richen up the top end. Time grew short, I grew weary from all the fumes and lack of sleep the past couple of days, and we called it a night with a "good enough to probably not blow up".

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We all long for the power and torque available from a 1275cc engine, but with these becoming more expensive and harder to find, we’ll take a look at the alternative of getting some decent power from the smallbore engines.

For the price of a good 1275 crankshaft you could buy two or three small-bore motors. The cost of reconditioning a small-bore block isn’t going to be a lot less than doing a 1275cc, but the cost savings on parts like the crank alone would go a long way towards modifying a 998cc or 1098cc motor.

Over the next few issues I’ll look at how to get the best results from an 1098cc engine. The bore for the 998cc and 1098cc engines are the same, but the 1098cc, with its longer stroke, will produce a better spread of torque across the rev range. If you wanted to do a 998cc the process is much the same. The engine will not give as good a torque figure, but it will rev more freely at the top end.

In this issue we will take a look at what we can do with the block, crank, and camshaft, pistons and rods.

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