The perfect performance Mini? It goes without saying that nimbleness, liveliness, agility - whatever you want to call it - has got to be an inherent characteristic, assisted of course by a healthy dose of grip and traction. Obviously it's also got to be pretty fast; not crazy-fast, as Minis have never been simply about straight-line speed, but fast enough to keep the car on the boil until the next corner arrives. And, above all, it's got to feel focused, full of character and always up for it; that's what Minis are all about after all.

Except that when you modify a Mini to achieve such attributes, generally you end up with something of a mess when evaluated at any discipline other than the one of going very fast indeed. Most people are happy to accept such compromise, but one person that was never happy with sacrifices was Daniel Richmond. For him, a car shouldn't have become more noisy, thirsty, temperamental or difficult to drive simply because its performance envelope was increased. And this is exactly why his company, Downton Engineering Works, achieved such a brilliant reputation for tuning competition and road-going BMC engines and, perhaps more famously, building the hot Minis that they went in to.

Unfortunately Downton didn't survive the death of Daniel in 1974, and then his wife Bunty, in 1976, but the company name was revived in 1993 when brothers Stuart and Paul Mickleburgh (who owned Symbol Mini Company at the time) began trading under the famous Downton name. The operation returned to what Downton did best: offering finely-tuned and flawlessly-developed products in limited numbers; the root of the original company's success had come from Daniel's and his employees' skill at developing and preparing tuning components and performance cars in very small numbers, fastidiously honing products to perfection. It was an ironic consequence of its success that, by the end of the company's life, it had turned into more of a large-scale production line, it had turned into more of a large-scale production line, churning out thousands of mass-produced tuning kits for BMC's range - a situation that Daniel was never happy with.