Mini Cooper S Countryman in Chile

Juan Band
Chilean Mini Racer
The Mini was a hot car in Chile in the 1960s, helped by multiple giant-killing wins against V-8-powered Fords and Chevrolets. Chile's most successful Mini racing driver was the charming Juan Armando Band, who almost always won his class and often the race, too. "They hated me," he says of his competitors. He founded a Mini team-called Aband, inspired by Abarth-and even managed a female team that included his wife. Band says that BMC was surprised at how advanced the Chilean racing cars became, featuring fuel injection and 140 hp well before British competition Minis. "They were more developed because we didn't have Porsches," he explains. Most of his wins came in steel-bodied Coopers, but Band raced fiberglass Minis, too. Chilean Minis
The Countryman is assembled in Austria, making it the first BMW-designed Mini made outside the U.K., but decades ago completely knocked-down Minis were assembled in factories around the world to beat import tariffs. That included Chile, where steel-bodied Minis, along with many other makes, were built from the early '60s in Arica's new industrial zone. Eventually, however, rising local-content requirements looked unattainable, until someone had the ingenious idea of making fiberglass bodies locally. Production began in 1969 but rarely met demand, and Minis were often airfreighted to customers, recalls factory worker Pedro Joquella. His job, besides working on final assembly, was to cut the window apertures for the one-piece shell and fit the glass and doors. "We made twelve cars a week-it was a very popular vehicle." But the enterprise abruptly ended with President Salvador Allende's 1973 overthrow by the military, which scrapped the local-content rules-although not before several thousand Minis de fibra were produced.