The interior gets changed as the rear seat is home to the engine!. A new bulkhead and engine cover/rear shelf hide the motor and keeps the elements out. Mini seats are designed for midgets, the headrest comes up to my shoulders. These are replaced with something more sporty and with proper neck protection.

The rest of the interior is pretty standard, keep it simple and light being the order of the day

Bulk head

To separate the driver from the engine a bulk head needs to be fitted to enclose the engine. Zcars make a very nice,  aluminium bulkhead come parcel shelf......but not cheap, listing at £500. I opted for the DIY route. Two 1x2m sheets of ali were ordered and lots of cardboard templates were made. I can see where the cost of the zcars item comes in, the shapes needed are complex. I reckon it was 30 hours work to build it. There were one or two features of the zcars bulkhead I didn’t like. It sits on the floor in front of the rear sub frame horizontal, creating a nice muck/water trap. My design attached to the top of the sub frame horizontal, eliminating that problem. I think the zcars version is designed to fit around either the R1 or ‘Busa engine, however, the R1’s exhaust doesn’t stick out very far so the “fireguard section of the bulkhead doesn’t need to be as intrusive, freeing up space to push the seat back a little.

bare bulkhead in place

Another feature of my design is that the “fireguard” is double skinned, in an attempt to keep the wall on the passenger side cool from the heating effects of the exhaust, it also helps to stiffen the whole item up.

Diagram of bulkhead make up

On the inside of the “fireguard” I also added some heat reflective heat mat stuff to further reduce the chance of heat getting to the out side surface.  I covered the whole lot with black carpet. The stuff I used was what the Max Power boys use for the sub woofer boxes. Its a light weight but non stretchy material that is easy to work with. With plenty of glue it dulled down the reverb of the bulk head nicely.

Carpeted bulkhead

Seats

I bought some Mamba bucket seats in black and red which are base mounted (Cheaper than the Cobra or Corbeau. Being ever the Yorkshireman, I didn’t want to pay £20 a seat for mounting brackets. I made my own out of a couple of lengths of aluminium L shaped strip and some roof joist supports. As you can see from the photo, does the job nicely.

I mounted the drivers seat as far back as possible, you can never get the seat far enough back in a mini! The passenger seat had to be mounted forward as the battery sits behind the passenger.

Carpet

Once the seat mounts were in their final position the carpet could be fitted. I bought a bright red carpet set from Minisport.  I thought I would waste a lot of it having the engine sat in the back, but no, not as much was trimmed off as I thought. With the red carpet in it looked a bit loud, but once the bulk head was carpeted in black it calmed the appearance down (well to a dull roar at least).

Dashboard

As you can read in the “Electrics” section I opted to use the Yamaha R1 dials. I toyed with the idea of mounting this straight ahead in the same position the original 3 dial mini console was. But as at the time I didn’t have the seats or know how far back the seats would be, or could be mounted I decided to mount the dials centrally. The angle of a mini steering wheel doesn’t lend itself to straight ahead dials either, so this seamed the best idea. I’d seen a dash at zcars that is a one piece, GRP item. Unfortunately it was £180...nice, but pricey. I wasn’t sure I’d be happy with the central dials so I decided to build a temporary dash from some old fake carbon fibre plastic sheet to get me up and running. One thing I learnt from building the Tiger is that until you start driving the car you don’t find out exactly where you’d really like all the switches and dials. Not that my dash ended up with many switches and dials, the Yamaha module takes care of most of it. I left the small mini rocker switch panel where it was for the Fog, headlights, brake warning/tester and Hazards. This left the stop/run switch needing a home and the start button. ...I found room! I didn’t have a big enough sheet of fake CF to do the full width so did it in three sections with the central 20cm strip painted bright red to match the body work. Sounds crap but actually worked fairly well, brightening up the otherwise dark dash. The plastic panels were bonded to some hardboard and the lot bolted into the gap between the bottom and top dash rails, hiding the electrics. The Yamaha instrument module was mounted on the dash top rail using the hole for the ash tray as the hole to feed the multi-plugged wire through. I think this works well, I prefer the glance across to the dials better than a glance down and across to where Mini central dials are normally mounted.

interior, showing simple dash

Finishing touches

I found some alloy window winders and door grabs on eBay going cheap. This look a bit more classy than the hard plastic originals. Some new door cards are a likely future buy, but they will do for now.