Michael Taylor•10 Sept 2012

REVIEW

MINI Countryman JCW 2013 Review - International

Name: MINI Countryman JCW 2013 Review - International
Brand: MINI

What would you do to a car whose biggest issue is fuel range? Give it more power, of course

MINI Countryman JCW

International Launch

Frankfurt, Germany

What we liked

>> Surprising ride quality

>> Solid mid-range performance

>> Progressive, forgiving handling

Not so much

>> Heavy, and feels it

>> More Cooper urge than JCW urge

>> Miniscule fuel range

OVERVIEW

>> Where the Countryman goes, a JCW is sure to follow

Where the Cooper S goes, MINI lore insists that a John Cooper Works version is sure to follow.

The Cooper S is always the politely brisk MINI; the JCW is supposed to be the brain-snapper that also has the bonus of earning MINI a tidy dollar on the side. It does this, normally, with a stiffer suspension setup, a louder exhaust and a handful more horsepower through some electronics fiddles of the engine management system.

This time is no different, except that it’s in the meatiest machine MINI makes (so far). So the Countryman JCW is a lot like the Cooper S version but faster, meaner-looking, more powerful and with a stiffer suspension setup.

PRICE AND EQUIPMENT

>> Cooper S Plus is the theme, inside and out

The hard thing about asking people to spend more money on a maximised version of your already-cooked car is visually differentiating it. Get that right and everybody else will know your buyers have something more than the norm.

The trouble is, we don’t yet know how much that extra spend will need to be.

MINI has added some bodywork to the JCW Countryman and not all of it works. The nose is full of brake vents and air intakes and a deeper chin, there is a rear spoiler that disguises the slightly odd standard roofline.

The jarring note is the side skirt at the bottom, which includes a horrid fake air intake. If this was a racing car, it would feed air into the rear brakes. It isn’t, and it doesn’t. It’s blanked off and it looks tacky, even moreso than the face air outlets behind the rear wheels.

You’re looking at a car that will come in seven body colours, almost all of them as garish as this one, and it gets its own steering wheel, seat trim, roof lining and detailing on the dials.

MINI being MINI, the options list runs longer than the standard specification list. You can ask for 19-inch wheels and tyres, you can get sportier seats, go-fast stripes and even different colours for the mirror shells.

A huge slice of MINI’s cheaper options hook into the car’s central rail that replaces a conventional tunnel. It’s an alloy extrusion into which you can clip cup holders, phone holders, big or small cubby holes and a grab bag of other bits and pieces.

You can get the rear made up in either two- or three-seat configuration, with a 60:40 split and fore-and-aft adjustment, too.

Up front, the JCW comes standard with climate control air conditioning, three automatically dimming mirrors, adaptive headlights, a tilty-slidey glass roof, parking distance control, a Harman-Kardon sound system and MINI Connected, to sync phones and iPads with the car.

MECHANICAL

>> Just like a Cooper S Countryman, but more

Everywhere you look around the JCW Countryman, you see the fingerprints of the Cooper S everywhere. It’s in the engine, it’s in the gearboxes, it’s in the suspensions and it’s in the software.

Well, less in the software than everywhere else, because apart from suspension tuning, this is the biggest area of difference.

The core of the 1.6-litre, four-cylinder engine is little changed, and that’s not bad news. It’s a strong little engine and it’s smooth enough, too. It’s also top shelf, technically, with direct fuel injection and a twin-scroll turbo-charger. It has VANOS variable valve timing that varies and controls the valve’s depth inside the combustion chamber to a single thousandth of a millimetre, depending on what the ECU asks for.

The changes are small, but important. There are different pistons, different valves and heavily revised cooling and air intake setups, too. It pumps out 160kW of power in JCW form – 25kW more than MINI delivers in the Cooper S Countryman – and it fills out the mid range with 280Nm of torque.

But all is not what it seems, because the Countryman JCW can overboost that torque number to 300Nm for brief, full-throttle bursts (like overtaking). This changes the shape of the torque curve, too, shrinking it down from a flat, 3100rpm-long plateau of peak torque that starts at 1900rpm to a 2300rpm burst beginning at 2100rpm.

This attaches to either a six-speed manual or a six-speed automatic and punches through an electro-magnetic centre differential, which is a complicated way of saying it’s all-wheel drive.

MINI says it will pump out 100km/h acceleration in 7.0 seconds, so all that extra money and power has shaved 0.9 seconds from the Cooper S’s sprint.

Underneath, it’s sitting on 18-inch wheels and tyres on a suspension that’s 10mm lower than the same car in Cooper S mode. The multi-link rear end and the MacPherson strut front end have both been strengthened, with stiffer springs, stiffer anti-roll bars and stiffer damping – so that’s not promising.

Underneath all of that sits what is always the Achilles heel of the petrol-powered Countryman models – a puny 47-litre fuel tank.

Its bodies are also built by Magna Steyr in Austria (no, Austria), while the engines are tweaked in Hams Hall, England.

PACKAGING

>> Reasonably practical, kinda sporty...

The Countryman JCW is stretched beyond four metres in length (4.13, to be exact), so you’d expect MINI to compensate you with some practicality for taking away all the mini.

It doesn’t do a bad job, though the luggage area isn’t huge. There is a 350-litre luggage space as standard, but you can split the rear seats to poke longer stuff through or fold them flat to create a 1170-litre hole.

You can also adjust the levels at the back before you buy the car, because while a three-seat bench is standard, you can order two individual seats for no cost.

COMPETITORS

>> It’s the smallest SUV out there, so MINI says...

MINI boss, Dr Kay Segler, insists MINI will always field the smallest car in the segment, regardless of where that segment is, the competitors in it or the fact that there is no longer a really mini MINI.

Yet finding anything the Countryman JCW directly lines up against is a very difficult task. There are other small SUVs but almost invariably, the MINI Countryman body is both smaller and demonstrably more expensive than they are.

On the horizon Audi has an S version of the Q3, rumoured to be powered by the same five-cylinder that sits in the TT-RS – and there's also the Nismo Juke to consider. Neither car is available in the here and now, but if the MINI isn't your cup of tea, these two might be worth the wait.

ON THE ROAD

>>Surprisingly good ride, flexible rather than fast

The first surprise is that it doesn’t ride anything like a JCW-spec MINI hatch. And that’s a good thing.

Despite MINI insisting it has been stiffened for the (oh, this is so embarrassing and gets more embarrassing every time I hear it) “go-kart handling” a JCW needs to have. Instead, what it gets is reliable handling and a terrific ride. In most situations, it feels like a taller, proper-riding MINI rather than the hot-rod JCW.

You can sweep it quickly over huge ruts without fearing for a bent rim or a busted sidewall, you can feel calm eyeing off big mid-corner bumps and yet it is taut enough to deliver confidence when it’s being thrown around, too.

It never quite bridges the gap towards entertainment, though that’s largely because of its 1405kg dry weight (1480kg on the EU scale). It just always feels like there’s a lot of convincing being done by the steering before anything sudden happens.

The engine feels smooth and the different exhaust lends it a crisp attacking sound. Yet it never feels like a sparkling jet. It will do 7.0 seconds to 100km/h, MINI says, but it sure doesn’t feel a scrap quicker than that. The difficult part is getting it to launch off the line, because there is a lot of grip from the all-paw drive system. You have to turn off its skid-control system, tweak the pedal until it’s revving as hard as it will give and even then you have to slip the clutch to stop it bogging down from excess grip after the launch.

It feels a better car when it’s left to do the heavy lifting in the torque curve in the middle. It will spin happily enough to 6000rpm, where the peak power lives, but the engine is heavily undersquare, leaning towards torque rather than revs.

The throttle response is brisk but becomes sharp when you flick the Sport button. Unfortunately the Sport button also comes with a sharp tightening of the electro-mechanical steering system that makes the car so pointy at the front end that it’s almost impossible to live with for any length of time. And certainly not at high speed.

The shame of that is that the engine’s response is far better on Sport, and it also delivers the burbling off-throttle sound that adds a degree of charm to the JCW’s engine note. You can have both, but not one separately.

The braking is strong, too, and the handling only ever feels like it’s struggling at very, very high speed on the autobahn. We saw an indicated 246km/h from the Countryman JCW, though the published top speed is only 225km/h. It starts to feel a little light in the front end at that sort of speed, but it’s eminently comfortable at more Australian-style numbers.

The standout issue remains fuel range, though. MINI claims 7.9L/100km for the JCW (0.6 worse than the stock Countryman), but we convinced it to hit the bottle harder than that. In fact, we drained the tank in a 300km test route. That 47-litre tank seemed annoying on a two-week test in a standard petrol Countryman, so this one is not going to be fun for those hitting the highways with any regularity. Still, at least you won’t struggle for fatigue, because you’ll be pulling over frequently for fuel.

That tank alone makes it a better city car than a car for extra-urban life and its practical interior and charming ride only add to its flexibility in town.

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MINI Countryman JCW 2013 Review - International

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