The rebooted Mini might have lost much of its British charm, but the infusion of German sports DNA (from Mini’s new parent company BMW) was really noticeable in the John Cooper Works edition of the Mini Cooper S. With 211 horsepower and 261 ft-lbs of torque from the turbocharged 1.6 liter 4-cylinder engine the JCW […]
This next car starts with the body of a new Mini Cooper…which was a front-wheel-drive thing assembled by BMW…but today’s Mini is not longer mini. It sits on an extended wheelbase and features power from an flathead Ford V8. The result is a strange looking combination of classic hot-rod proportions and style of a late […]
I’ve been a big fan of the new Mini by BMW product that has been sold since around Y2K, because those cars depreciate quickly and offer a fun modern take on the classic front-drive light car paradigm. The only thing BMW did wrong is to make the car about 10% larger than it should have been, which if you then back calculate to volume, you’ve got a car that is 27% heavier than it should be…and that’s not very “mini”, is it? Forget the modern version of the Mini and get a classic Mini, they built them through the year 2000 and you can back-date the looks to the ’60s like the seller did with this next one. Find this 1992 Mini Cooper offered for $11,500 in Phoenix, AZ via craigslist. Tip from Rock On!
This next seller needs a lesson in first impressions — when you advertise a car, the first thing you should not include in your description is the phrase “works” complete with quotation marks. What the seller meant to say is that it is the John Cooper Works edition, which is a special edition of the […]
Spider Man is an interesting hero, but he is mostly clueless and his biggest assets are his perky persona and agile reflexes…sorta like a classic Mini. But imagine, for a minute, if you poured some of the awesome power of someone like the vampire hunter Blade into Peter Parker’s suit and spider-abilities…now you’d have a […]
The re-invented 21st century Mini was designed/developed around the turn of the century in a collaboration between Rover and BMW…but ultimately the design was much more Munich and not so much Gaydon. The car was produced in Oxford, England, but with an American designer, French engines, and German engineering, so it is about as British […]
The original Mini was produced for an insanely long period of time — 41 years to be precise — with only minor changes from 1959 through 2000. The long in the tooth Mini was probably the best 1950s designed car you could buy in 1980 (aside from that Alfa convertible thing) but does that mean […]
The long term effects of amphetamines and barbiturates, the tool of the 1970’s trucker, and a dabble of LSD can be studied using this rolling Rorschach test. Likely devised while licking the last bit of truck-stop cheese grits from the bowl in a 4AM meth-and-Jolt induced fog, this rig, let’s call it the Waste-ern Star, was […]
BMW’s revived Mini brand has been on a tear in the past few years with lots of new models and generally positive press. Mini released the Coupe at the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show with raked windshield and funky backwards baseball cap styling attributed to Marcus Syring who is probably best known for his work on […]
In 2006 BMW decided to let the outgoing first generation Mini Hatch leave with a bang. It started with the Cooper S model (around $22k), and added the John Cooper Works GP kit (another $10k) to create one of the most expensive first gen Neue-Minis to leave the factory in Cowley, Oxfordshire. The JCW GP […]