MINI Cooper S Roadster 2012 Review - International

MINI Cooper S Roadster

The English press thinks MINI has converted the basic three-door hatchback into a genuine Mazda MX-5 competitor at a fraction of the development cost. MINI, meanwhile, is making all the noises it can to encourage their thinking, without actually directly encouraging their thinking.

And they’re wise to stay j-u-s-t short of pitching their Roadster as an MX-5 competitor for the simple reason that the MINI Roadster is patently not an MX-5 competitor. No matter how much marketing cleverness parent company BMW throws at the argument.

It is, though, a roofless version of the Coupe version of the standard MINI Cooper S and, though it will also be offered with the usual array of engine and handling options, the Cooper S version is the one we played with.

Ditching the Coupe’s odd-looking roofline was never going to hurt the Roadster’s look, and neither was gaining the Coupe’s short boot lid and ditching the MINI Cabrio’s need to have a roof that comfortably covers people in the two rear seats.

It’s a far cleaner looking machine in profile and makes you wonder if this might have been the one MINI actually designed first, rather than the Coupe. Either way, its design was finished before current MINI design boss, Anders Warming, arrived, so he’s not saying.

Though the Convertible, the Roadster, the Coupe and the stock hatch are all essentially redressed versions of the same machinery, the Roadster finds a way to feel sportier than the other roofless MINI, mainly through a windscreen that’s raked 13 degrees flatter.

That flatter screen also reduces a touch of drag, which is more than offset by its pop-up rear spoiler, which automatically lifts at 80km/h.

The roof is clever and simple, too. There is a lever above the mirror that you just twist and release, then the MINI automatically drops it down into a hole between the seats and the boot lid, where its top section doubles as a tonneau cover.

Like the Coupe, the Roadster is a strict two-seater, and it carries over the strangely hatted hardtop’s 240 litres of luggage space, too, along with its poke-through portal.

The Coupe is also stiffer through the greenhouse than the MINI hatch, and the Roadster carries this over, too. With more weight over the front axle than the Convertible, we can assume much of this stiffening has gone to strengthen the firewall and any other bits connected to the longer windscreen.

It still runs the usual MINI MacPherson strut front end, though it has stiffer springs and dampers than the Convertible and is geared up to be an altogether pointier machine. And it succeeds terrifically in doing that.

The Roadster feels stiffer the instant it rolls over a driveway exit and onto a piece of blacktop, but that doesn’t mean it rides too hard. Oddly, it doesn’t, even if the Convertible (with its softer suspension) sometimes does.

The ride is one of the bigger surprises in the Roadster, because it never crashes, even over paved stone roads that weren’t level a hundred years ago and have lived hard in the interim. It doesn’t completely eliminate the shake the Convertible gets in its windscreen pillars over bumps, but it’s pretty good.

Just as civilised as the Coupe with the roof up, the Roadster isn’t bad when the roof’s down, either. There is some buffeting to the top of the head, but even this is reduced when you fit the wind blocker behind the front seats. The buffeting does make a bit of noise, though.

The Roadster feels more coherent at speed than the Convertible, too, but it never quite convinced us that it has the MX-5’s level of agility. The front-drive Cooper S Roadster has a stiffer sports suspension as an option, but you’d only buy it if you were absolutely determined to spend money for no apparent reason. The car just doesn’t need it, because it’s successfully using its 195/55 R16 rubber to walk a very fine line between ride and handling as it is.

It takes some getting used to initially, because its electronic steering setup is just so much pointier than most cars out there. The faintest of steering wheel movements can make the MINI jump across lanes. That’s good in corners, but it’s a handy thing to get used to before diving into heavy traffic.

Where this steering comes into its own is when you’re alone on a winding mountain road. Find that mythical piece of heaven and you’ll be rewarded with a MINI that whips into corners with speed and assurance, and a flat cornering stance, then pulls its way out again with surprising grip from a front-driver.

While it’s fast, the Roadster’s steering can’t go toe-to-toe with an MX-5 for nuance, feedback and precision, even with its slightly sharper Sports mode switched in.

We’ve already said we wouldn’t bother with the harder Sports suspension (or the relatively gluggy auto), but the electronic diff option is another matter altogether. It’s this that helps the Roadster stick so rigidly to its line on corner exits by sending drive to the outside wheel, and it also helps to reduce the usual torque steer you get in more-potent MINIs.

If we’ve left the engine and gearbox alone a bit, it’s because there’s nothing new here, rather than there being anything boring or inadequate about them. It’s exactly the opposite, and the Cooper S’s direct-injection, twin-scroll turbo-charged four-cylinder is one of the best in the business.

There is 135kW of power bubbling out of it at 5500rpm and a strong 240Nm working through the motor from 1600 to 5000rpm, all of which means it’s a solidly flexible drive from around 1500 revs to the rev limiter nearer to 6000rpm.

But while it can happily run at middling revs in heavy traffic situations, that doesn’t mean that’s what it will encourage you to do. It won’t. It will want you to rev it hard in Sport mode, to listen to it pop and crackle as you roll off the throttle. There’s a real fizz to it that energizes the whole car and it begs you to launch into it any time there’s even a hint of space in front of you. And surely that’s what a Roadster’s engine is for, no?

It doesn’t always hook up so happily with the six-speed manual, though, and for all of the gear shifter’s good looks, the shifts themselves can be unnecessarily clunky (we detect the fingerprints of enthusiastic marketing boffins here) and can make smooth shifts difficult to attain.

Between the engine and gearbox, though, they combine to eke 6.0L/100km out of its 50-litre tank on the combined cycle, which is good enough for 139g/km of CO2.

While fuel economy is a bonus for most two-seat convertible buyers, performance is a must and the Cooper S Roadster flits to 100km/h in 7.0 seconds, and heads off in chase of its 227km/h top speed. The 155kW John Cooper Works version is half a second quicker to 100km/h and 10km/h quicker at the top end, but it asks for even more compromises in daily life, particularly in ride quality.

It’s not demonstrably thirstier or slower than Old Helmet Head, either, because the Cooper S Coupe uses 0.2L/100km less and is only a tenth of a second quicker to 100km/h.

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