Mini John Cooper Works
Posted by Matt Master at 4:30PM on Tuesday 15 July, 2008 0 Comments
A stock in trade for the modern motoring journalist is to bemoan the fact that all cars are too heavy these days, weighed down as they are with endless safety equipment and unnecessary luxury.
This broadly irrefutable fact hits the hot hatch hardest, for this is the niche most at the mercy of the 'kg' v 'cc' imbalance.
Take inherently non-sporty design and small engine, add airbags, a pinch of air con and suddenly you're buggered.
Or you were. The new Mini already has most of the right ingredients to be an outstanding hot hatch. Great chassis, sharp steering, comparatively little weight and a low centre of gravity.
What it needs is more power. More even than a Cooper S. What it wants is the John Cooper Works treatment. And this doesn't mean the old aftermarket kit.
It's an in-house project now, one that tunes the 1.6-litre to fairly colossal 208bhp.
This allows the Works to knock off 60mph in 6.5 seconds and almost hit 150mph.
The engine has been quite heavily fettled to achieve this, with a new head, pistons and an exhaust system that sounds like a mid-Eighties XR3i that someone's taken a hand drill to.
(Which is a good thing round here.)
All this and even more boost from the turbo means you arrive everywhere much earlier than you expected. The exhaust roars and crackles, the turbo whines, the chassis grips, the passengers whimper.
This really is the sort of hot hatch dewy-eyed old motoring hacks have been pining for.
But they'll fit about the tacky body kit, all of it purely cosmetic. They might also gripe about the 18-inch alloys that make for a very young man's notion of ride quality.
Then there's the price. A basic model for £20,995 is big money.
Enough to get you into a Golf GTI (current hot hatch benchmark), or even the new Scirocco (hot hatch benchmark in waiting.)
These things are better all-rounders, there's no doubt about that, but they're bordering on sensible where the John Cooper Works is borderline bonkers.
Your call.
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