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MINI COOPER - What Car?
01.07.2001 |
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Yeah, baby - new MINI's still groovy
BMW's new take on the MINI keeps the character and builds on the fun of the original.
At last. It's time to stop talking about the new MINI and start driving it. Almost four years after the first preview of the car - engineered in Germany by BMW and now being built by them near Oxford in a factory which once turned out the Morris MINI Minor - we have a set of keys in our hands and a MINI Cooper in the car park.
How appropriate, too, that the launch venue should be Italy. Many things contributed towards Sir Alec Issigonis's 1959 MINI becoming one of the 'in' cars of the Swinging Sixties, but high up the list would be its starring role in the Michael Caine bullion-heist film, The Italian Job.
Remember the mad dash around the test track on the roof of Fiat's old Lingotto plant and then through the sewers of Turin as three MINIs attempted to give the carabinieri the slip? Fortunately, there's no need to go to quite those lengths to find out what the new MINI is like. The twisting, hillside roads of Umbria will serve just fine to reveal whether BMW's interpretation of a 42-year-old classic has those things that made Issigonis's original such fun to drive.
The face it presents to the world is instantly recognisable, just as you know straight away what the new Volkswagen Beetle is meant to be. There the differences end, though. The Beetle is based on a Golf and has a completely different layout to the original. The MINI is all new and faithful to Issigonis's transverse engine, front-drive ideals. BMW people deny it is retro, but as Mandy Rice-Davies uttered during the Profumo scandal in another of those memorable moments from the Sixties, 'they would say that, wouldn't they?'
BMW has just about bled the old car dry for design themes and ideas. The new MINI's stance and proportions, the shape of its lamps and grilles, its chrome highlights and badging - even the Cooper's contrast-colour roof and lookalike MINIlite wheels - are indebted to the original. Well, what did you expect? Anything else wouldn't have justified being called 'MINI', and certainly would have had little chance of driving like one.
What it doesn't have is the brilliant packaging of Issigonis's original. It's actually 20mm longer than a Mercedes A-class, the car that has come closest to bringing Issigonis's ideas on maximum passenger room within MINImum dimensions up to date. BMW says it has made the newcomer as short as possible while meeting its internal targets for space and crash protection, but, sitting at the kerbside, the car we're about to drive looks most un-MINI. You get the same sensation from the inside, too, although that means you feel much less vulnerable now when surrounded by artics and coaches on the motorway.
This is BMW's first effort at a transverse-engined, front-drive car. Unlike the Issigonis MINI, there are five gears instead of four, and they're in a separate box on the end of the power unit rather than in the sump, although a constantly variable automatic (CVT) with Steptronic manual shift and six pre-set ratios is also available. The engine is a 16-valve 1.6 sourced from Chrysler, and it's one BMW will probably be only too happy to disclaim responsibility for. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's the only real negative about the new MINI.
In the Cooper it develops 115bhp and 110lb ft of pull, although there are times when both of those figures stretch credibility. Admittedly, when you're stuck in a commuter crawl or in Sunday-driver mode the engine is flexible and hushed, but if you're disposed to buy a MINI the chances are you'll be hoping to avoid either scenario, and that's when it shows its darker side.
Basically, it lacks mid-range urge for pulling the car out of slow corners and gathering overtaking speed, often leaving you unsure whether second or third gear is best-suited. The first of those options raises the revs to a point where more happens, but it also ups the decibel level. The engine becomes thrashy and then boomy, and there's vibration which resonates in the cabin. All this will be all-too-familiar to old MINI owners. This lack of urge does not augur well for the less powerful, £10,300 MINI One, which has 25bhp and 6lb ft less to call upon, although at least it gives its all at lower revs.
Fortunately, the chassis helps you to forget some of your frustrations with the engine. While the new MINI's size and weight are bound to deny it some of the immediacy of the original, it's still an extremely alert car, and there are some compensations - better resistance to the effects of mid-bend bumps, stronger grip through much bigger wheels and tyres and the option of unobtrusive electronic traction aids.
Tip it towards a bend and, with a low centre of gravity, wheels of up to 17 inches in diameter pushed as far out to the corners as possible and a highly stiff shell, it's quick to find a new course and incredibly resistant to body roll. It uses simple suspension struts at the front with a modified version of the current BMW 3-series axle at the back. The Cooper also has a rear anti-roll bar, missing from MINI One, and rides 8mm lower.
On the 16-inch mid-size wheels fitted to our car it holds on to the road so well you'll find yourself under-employing the reserves of grip at first. Find a clear corner with a good sight-line and you can pitch it in at what seems like an absurd speed and still get around.
Go in harder still, come off the power and it will even go into a gentle drift. BMW has absorbed what made the old MINI such great fun to drive and instilled it into the new one, and you won't have the bruises to show for it as you would with the Hydragas-suspended original. The new MINI is firm but superbly damped, smoothing as well as controlling the ride.
You'll no longer have to use the steering wheel as a brace while you're enjoying yourself, either. The front cabin in the new MINI is roomy enough for a proper-sized seat with good side support and a steering column that's not set at an angle normally only found on double-decker buses. Both have height adjustment - unknown luxuries for an old MINI owner.
The steering has electronic power assistance that varies so that you get most help at low speed. When you need weight and substance, it's there, and you know what's going on with the front tyres, too. The car has equal-length driveshafts that curb tugs at the wheel when making rapid getaways on poor road surfaces and there are disc brakes at all four corners to execute equally sure stops, with electronics to prevent lock-up and even ensure the car can't be unsettled by mid-bend braking.
If all of this seems absurdly high-tech to anyone who knows MINIs of old, the cabin décor has a reassuringly familiar look, mixed in with just a hint of Audi TT, although the 'metal' panels turn out to be plastic. Best of all, everything has the solidity expected of a BMW, giving no suggestion this car has been built down to a price.
The speedometer is big, round, silver-faced and sited in the middle of the dash where it's not easily read, while the rev counter fitted to the Cooper is in a little pod on top of the steering column.
There's a full-width shelf, just as there was in Issigonis's car, and no glovebox. Where it might be is occupied by the passenger airbag - one of four that come as standard. There's no need for the Self Preservation Society of Italian Job fame here - the car is heavily into the protection racket. ISOFIX child seat-mounting points are also built in, and side curtain airbags plus traction and stability controls are on an extensive list of options.
Little toggle switches work some of the minor controls so you can pretend you're in one of the Monte Carlo Rallye MINIs of the mid-'60s, but these days they're shielded to prevent them puncturing knee-caps in a serious accident.
Around the rest of the cabin it all gets more modern. There are a couple of cupholders on the floor, near a gearlever which is short and chunky and as far removed from the spindly dog-leg affair of the '59 MINI as it's possible to get. The shift is short and light and seems to suck the lever into the next ratio.
The door pockets are elaborate affairs built into huge oval armrests and door pulls, but anything of any size falls out of them when you're cornering hard. It's impossible to adjust the front backrests when the vast doors are closed, and the tilt-and-slide mechanism that lets people into the back doesn't always return those forward seats to the position they were in previously.
Slide them right back and they almost touch the two rear seats. With a six-foot driver aboard there's not really the knee or foot space for another adult behind, although headroom is good.
It's a two-plus-two cabin, or maybe a three-plus-one. The boot is for shopping bags only unless you lower the backrests of the two equal-sized rear seats, but even then there's a hump in the floor that stops you putting in anything too bulky. And there's no spare wheel. Cars with 15in wheels get a puncture repair kit while the 16in and 17in options are fitted with tyres that can be driven at limited speed without coming off the rim.
Verdict Issigonis crafted his MINI as a MINImalist way of transporting four people. It was almost an accident of birth, because of the way it was configured, that it turned out to be such a joyous little thing to drive. BMW has had to be unusually sensitive about replacing a car with such a heritage, and has done a brilliant job (engine apart) of understanding what the MINI was all about and preserving its character while updating it. That goes for the looks, too.