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Thanks for the info. Very confusing though.
Sorry Dave, I didn't mean to be confusing, but I admit it’s a confused situation.
There's a really good thread on the early Sprints written by Mike Barker here
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=21814. Unfortunately all the pictures - including that of the press release letter for the Sprint that says the first 2000 will only be available in Mimosa - were on the Photobucket site, and they've stopped being a free service. Hopefully Mike can re-link those pictures if he gets chance.
That letter doesn't say whether that's the first 2000 made or first 2000 sold that are only available in Mimosa. And as it's from marketing (if I remember correctly) not production, it could easily mean sold not made. Also, I've been told, by people who claimed to know, that BL didn’t always build cars in exact order of their chassis numbers; however, I wasn't there and it's only what I've been told. It's further mixed up because at least some of these cars were stockpiled, and then dispatched in a different order to, possibly the reverse of, their build sequence. There would also have been some cars used for special purposes, e.g. press garage use, that didn’t go to the dealers, at least not straight away. And they wouldn’t count to the first 2000 sold.
Also, from a production engineering perspective, if marketing have promised to sell 2000 Mimosa cars, production would probably make a few more: there’s a reasonably predictable failure rate on production lines (I once saw some figures for Rover 800, and it surprised me how high they were); some of those could be fixed quickly, some needed longer, and a few never made it to the showroom in their own right; so it comes as no surprise to me that the chassis numbers for the first 2000 cars available for sale spread 5 or 10 percent beyond 2000. Anyway, the first known Sprint that wasn't Mimosa (according to info from TahitiSPRINT) was chassis number 22xx; though the data is spread thin around that area - the previous one is yours and the next one is over 2600.
So it may not be totally certain that those Mimosa cars with chassis number from 2001 to 2100 or even 2200 can be said to be part of that “first 2000”. However, it's clearly not possible to say categorically that they aren't, and I for one think they are – though, obviously, I’m biased.
It may also be worth noting that it’s the first 5000 cars made in 1973 that allowed BL to get the Group 1 homologation for the Dolomite Sprint in January 1974, and use it so successfully in the British Saloon Cars Championship.