| ROAD TEST: MINI Cooper |
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by Ross Finlay (07 Jul 01)
It's also about 300 times better built and finished. The new MINI paint shop at Cowley turns out cars with a deep, lustrous exterior finish otherwise undreamed-of in the sub-£12,000 category. And there's a precision about the panel gaps and interior fittings which shows that, although this may be BMW's first small car in modern times, it's built in the UK under a Bavarian quality control regime. Maybe the home-owned British motor industry would have survived longer, and gone on to produce cars like this, if we'd given the nod to a request in 1945 from some Bavarian politicians. Fed up with being hauled around by the Prussians, they asked that their part of Germany should become a "detached" region of the United Kingdom. Another chance missed. The Cooper takes up a remarkable stance on the road. When it's stationary, you can see that the wheelbase is long, the track is wide, and there are very businesslike Goodyear Eagle tyres at the extreme outward corners of the chassis. It also looks very low-slung, with shallow windows, to the point where you wonder what the headroom can be like. There's no need to worry, because the high waistline creates a kind of optical illusion, and tall drivers won't have any problems. Tall passengers in the rear seat are nothing like as comfortably accommodated, but that's hardly the point. While luggage space is generous only in comparison with the titchy amount in the old BMC cars, a case and various soft bags should fit in with no bother. Another important point to be made about the MINI is that the bodyshell has great torsional rigidity. There's nothing else at the price which feels so all-of-a-piece and, when being barrelled around, so clearly focused dynamically. The massive centrally mounted speedometer is stylistically somewhat OTT, although the lit-up face looks good at night, and the similar but scaled-down rev-counter behind the steering wheel isn't quite as well located as it might be. I never really got to grips with the driving position, because I wanted more adjustment of the steering column than the car allows.
There's a dinky little digital clock above the too-small interior mirror. The torpedo-shaped lights and wiper stalks behind the wheel are jokey and convenient. And there's a row of rather appealing aeroplane-cockpit switches on the central console. Is the 1.6-litre BMW/Chrysler engine from South America rather a let-down, as some critics have implied? Well, you can't call it a classic power unit, make no mistake about that. But in Cooper tune it punts the MINI along pretty smartly, and if you want additional bhp, that's what the Cooper S, on sale next year, will provide. The Cooper has a drive-by-wire throttle and a very impressive gear change action. While the lever isn't all that light to shift around the gate, it has no lost motion, no wobble, no sensation - ever - that you've found that pesky dead-end slot in the no-man's-land between third and fifth. Of course, the real question about a car with this name is: does it handle? It handles brilliantly, although not with the dance-on-a-sixpence agility of the old Mini Cooper, which was so much lighter and so much flimsier, stood on a shorter wheelbase and had nothing like the same amount of rubber pressing on the tarmac. What the new car does particularly well is perform the old "cornering on rails" trick. There are several sporting hill roads in the CARkeys neck of the woods, and the Cooper tackled them with gusto, cornering with minimal body roll, and really tucking in securely on bends that tightened as they went farther round. I'm dismayed that some testers have bad-mouthed this car because it 's so reluctant to break traction at either end. That stuff is for boy racers. What's the point of trying to reach breakaway point with a car whose design and development team clearly devoted a lot of time and expertise in the interests of making sure that it wouldn't break away? Give me the engineer's approach rather than the opposite-locker's, any day. The new MINI has mature, stable, responsive and dependable handling. You want an autotest car? Go buy one with not so many capital letters. Price: £11,600 |
Our test car had the £300 extra-cost Pepper interior equipment pack and silver metallic-effect trim. It's all a bit heavy on the metal look, but one of the main points about the MINI is that there's a massive range of options and extra equipment. Inside, at least, it offers something like the design-it-yourself approach normally available only to car buyers with a six-figure sum to spend.
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