Austin Mini Cooper S

Then and Now  Card #71/250  Red/White - 2026 Hot Wheels Mainline. The Austin Mini Cooper S is one of the most consequential small cars in automotive history, a 1960s icon whose transverse-engine, front-wheel-drive layout by Alec Issigonis became the template nearly every modern hatchback still follows. Its rally pedigree is just as storied — Mini Coopers famously won the Monte Carlo Rally outright in 1964, 1965, and 1967 (the 1966 win was controversially disqualified), giant-killing performances against cars many times their size and displacement. Placed in the Then and Now series, this casting exists specifically to be paired conceptually against a modern performance counterpart, celebrating how far small-car engineering has traveled since Issigonis's original sketch. The red-over-white paint with a white roof references the classic British Racing look the Cooper S wore during its competition heyday. Few castings in the Hot Wheels catalogue carry as much genuine engineering history packed into such a small footprint.