Powerful supercharged engine combined with great handling set the
MINI Cooper S apart – but the ride is bad. A real alternative to a small sports car wherever you drive.
It could be a love-hate relationship with the MINI Cooper S. You’ll love the responsive and gutsy engine, with masses of power from 4,000 upward. But you’ll groan when you decide to overtake with 3,000 rpm on the clock. You’ll love the handling, but you won’t like the ride – it makes almost any sports car seem supple!
Funky interior
Whether you’ll love or hate the funky interior I don’t know. It doesn’t work for me, even though I’m pretty used to funkiness, living near a town that is supposed to be in the top ten towns worldwide for funkiness. You get a great big and ugly speedo in the middle of the car – the original looked a lot better – and a rev-counter in front of you. The layout is OK, just the choice of design that I can live without. The minor switches are all chrome plated too.
Some of the paint jobs are pretty funky, too, including the dark grey one I drove.
Still, these are minor grouses. The seating position is just fine, and the seat gives pretty good lateral support. It’s not so brilliant on a long journey, but on the whole does the job. With a large 1.6 litre engine in a small car you expect lively performance and you get it – especially in the Cooper S, which has a supercharged 170 bhp engine.
Supercharging usually gives you plenty of power at all speeds, but not in the S. Maybe the engine is just too small for the blower to give the boost you need at 2,500-3,000 rpm, so instead, the engine is just silky smooth at low speeds. Push your foot to the floor at that speed and unless you’re in first or second, you’ll wait for the power.
Stacks of power from 4,000 to 7,000 rpm
Once you get the blower spinning faster, the power comes on – and I mean fast. The car just rockets up to the limiter at 7,000 rpm in no time at all, or so it seems, and it seems even faster than it is because in a small car like this the hedges flash past faster than in a large, fast car. Use the gears – and that means second and third at legal road speeds – and this little car really flies, embarrassing larger metal, just like the original Mini Cooper S did.
Combined with good gearshift
The gearshift is also very good. It is spring-loaded to the third-fourth gate in the normal manner, and has a short travel. Unlike some boxes, it is easy to push across into fifth-sixth. Even so, I was left wondering whether a sixth gear was needed, or whether it was there for fashion – this is becoming quite common.
You see, the S will do 40, 60 and 90 mph in the first three gears, so when you’re driving fast on twisty roads, you don’t need anything more than third. In fact, you only need fifth and sixth for cruising. The engine is so flexible that it would work well with a five-speed box, although it's heresy to say so. Of course, fifth and sixth would be useful on a race track, but that isn’t what the MINI Cooper S is about.
Drive along the motorway, and you’re a happy chappy because the car is quiet, tracks beautifully, and cruises at any practical speed you like. The ride is not bad so long as the road is smooth, and apart from a bit of road noise all is well.
Minis and MINIS are all about cornering
Minis and MINIs are all about cornering, and the new incarnation lives up to expectations. It takes some time to see what’s happening, because it doesn't really behave like a typical front-drive hot hatch.
With almost all front-drivers you start turning before the corner to persuade the car to turn from the straight and narrow; the MINI just turns in. Great. And that’s not all. Once I started attacking some really twisty roads, I found that the S went round on rails, with virtually no roll. In these conditions, the handling is neutral, and not much lock is needed.
Push hard, and the car is still impressively neutral, although one some corners the understeer can build up. You can prevent that by chucking the car into the corner in true Mini manner, and should the understeer build up you can control it with lift off. This shows that a front-driver can handle well – although it is not so easy to do that with a bigger and longer car. The 205/45R 17 tires may be on big wheels – possibly too big – but they are not excessively wide for the car, which shows that the handling really is right.
As with all front-wheel drive cars, the Cooper S is prone to spinning its wheels coming out fast from a T-junction, but this is controlled by the traction control, and there’s also the optional torque-sensing limited slip diff.
Like many small hot hatches there is not much wheel travel, which shows up not just in the hard ride, but also when you go really fast over a sharp hump. The front wheels can become airborne for a split second, in rally fashion. So long as you keep steering straight no problem.
But that ride seems worse than the last Minis!
When you’re hustling along, you might not expect to notice the ride, but you do. It is bad on many road surfaces, shaking you all over the place. It is not just a case of hard springs – several sports cars have harder springs – but a combination of hard springs, strut fronts which creates stiction, a short wheelbase and some body shake.
Because of the short wheelbase the car pitches a lot, and this is the biggest fault. Had Rover not abandoned the interconnected system of the last Minis, and a modern version used on the MINI, the car would ride well and still handle the way it does now. That’s the stuff of pipe dreams.
Nevertheless, very few cars can match the Cooper S for sheer exhilaration in driving – including those that cost a lost more. There is also the Cooper S Works, with over 200 bhp, and one of the British tuning specialists has souped up the Cooper S to do 165 mph. Wow!
