Minis for everything

MARK RICHARDSON/TORONTO STAR

There’s a lot more space in the rear of the Clubman than in the regular Cooper.

Mark Richardson

WHEELS EDITOR

The other day, I stepped out of a Mini John Cooper Works Clubman – the hot version that makes 208 hp – and into a stock Mini Cooper convertible, which costs $10,000 less. That's the heavy one with all the extra weight of its powered soft-top roof, and just 118 hp.

As you can imagine, I was unimpressed.

"Can you believe, the pedal's hard to the floor," I told my passenger as we lumbered away from the Mini head office.

"What a slug!"

This was after a few days in the JCW Clubman, long enough to get used to its whippy power, not to mention all the other foibles of Canada's smallest station wagon.

I'd zipped here and zipped there, all over town, using the little car like the delivery van it had been in its original 1960s form, back when it was favoured by plumbers and electricians across traffic-congested Europe.

The rear space was large enough for bags of water-conditioner salt and soccer equipment, though not quite tall enough for the 30 kg dog that shares our household.

It even had a shallow hidden compartment under the rear floor.

The Cooper doesn't have that kind of space – nowhere near it. That's what its rear seat is for.

In the shorter-wheelbase Cooper, my two young sons would be begging the front seat riders to slide forward to create some leg room.

The Clubman's back seats, though, were large enough for them to sit comfortably. Indeed, its seats were apparently designed by the same guy who created the sofa-esque rear seat in the Rolls-Royce Phantom, so you can guess where his priority lay.

And the wagon even has a half-door on the right side for entry into the back, so that the front seat doesn't need to be slid forward for access, as it would with any coupe.

There's no doubt that the Clubman in whatever guise is more practical, with its little split-door rear bay, but it doesn't really look the part of the sporty demon that the costly JCW upgrades turns it into.

After all, the considerable extra horsepower of the JCW kit means the $39,950 car is essentially race ready, but who would want to race a three-quarter-sized Ford Flex?

I guess there's someone for everything, but if you just want the practicality of the Clubman, the base model with the regular engine starts at $26,400. That's sensible.

If you want it with a bit more oomph, you'll get a better deal paying the $31,500 base price for the Clubman S, which gives you a turbocharger that turns 172 hp from its little 1.6 L engine. It'll only be a half-second slower from 0-to-100 km/h than the JCW, after all.

That turbocharger would be nice in the convertible Cooper, to turn the little soft-top into a more nippy roadster than its regular engine allows. Mini knows this, and sells the Cooper S convertible for $36,350.

Crawling up through the gears on that first afternoon, the basic convertible was neither fast nor furious, just cute, and cute alone doesn't always cut it.

Other things annoyed me, too.

The driver's rear visibility, severely criticized in the previous generation, is still appalling.

Mini tried to improve it by making the back seat headrests lower – the chrome tubes around the head rests are crash bars, which now lift up if the Mini rolls over to protect the occupants from being crushed – but the engineers could only do so much with what they had.

With the roof in place, you can hide an entire Hyundai Accent in its right-side blind spot. Don't ask how I know this.

When the roof's down, wind swirls through the Mini with a ferocity unusual in most convertibles. Don't order a coffee and drive away with the cup in the cupholder – if the roof's down, it'll be cold within a couple of minutes.

You'll need to drink it quickly, anyway, since the stiff suspension and short wheelbase will soon splash the top half of the cup all around the compartment. Worse, don't be holding the cup over your clean, light-coloured trousers when hitting bumps on the Gardiner Expressway. Again, don't ask.

Roof up or down, the Cooper was noisy, so that I had to shout into the Bluetooth speakers when using the phone. Listeners at the other end said I sounded as if I was at the bottom of a well.

But the Mini's not supposed to be all about convenience and comfort; if that's what you want, there are plenty of other choices. It's supposed to be fun.

That's why the convertible has a little clock that measures the time the roof is down, though I never could understand its point. Perhaps there might be bragging rights to knowing that you've driven better than a certain ratio topless, but just as a cumulative time? Pointless.

After a day or two though, when I stopped missing the horsepower of the JCW and grew used to the unassuming power of the regular engine, the Cooper became a whole lot better.

I came to appreciate the deep bulup bullfrog noise of the seat-belt warning, instead of the tiresome chime of other cars. I loved the simple stalk-end button of the wipers that set them to rain-sensitive mode, so I could press it and forget it. And of course, the 7.1 L/100 km fuel consumption of the engine was very welcome – a full litre better than the racier JCW.

At that rate, I could almost forgive the high-compression engine's need for premium gas. Almost.

And I could almost forgive the Mini's dismal last-place ranking in J.D. Power's recent reliability survey, in which 165 problems were reported for every 100 owners. Almost.

By the end of the week, I'd even forgotten the speediness of the JCW version. The regular engine felt pretty nippy, certainly compared to most regular cars, and it was good to not feel guilty about hogging space in city traffic.

Neither car was quite right, though. Too much power in the mini-wagon and not enough in the fun-mobile. I guess that's why Mini makes the supercharged Cooper S to sit between the two. Maybe that's a car I could live with, foibles and all.

mrichardson@thestar.ca

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