MINI JCW 2015 Review

MINI has never built a production car with this much power before – and all of it is punched through the front wheels. The result is a good car, but one more at home on long, sweeping bends than short, sharp ones and a car that’s a lot more civilized than JCWs past.

There are people who like their MINIs and there are people who like their MINIs fast. Then there are people who like their MINIs to be the fastest, and they are the ones who’ll spend the traditionally painful extra wedge for the MINI John Cooper Works.

And they won’t be disappointed in the straight-line stakes. The new version of the MINI JCW is the fastest and most powerful one ever built.

It has reaped the fruits of the growth in engine capacity from 1.6 to 2.0 litres and now punches out 170kW of power. That’s enough to rip it to 100km/h in 6.1 seconds, though the manual gearbox version is 0.2 seconds slower than that.

What might surprise them, though, is that the new JCW has discovered civility. And it hasn’t just discovered a veneer of civility, but it’s actually got a depth of civility that is integrated right down in its core.

Not the Roman Empire kind of civility that smiles as its slaves knock up big buildings for posterity, then commits genocide on its neighbours, either. It’s genuinely, unflappably genteel.

The first, supercharged JCW wasn’t much like that. It was raucous and grumpy and fractious and choppy and struggled to make even moderately enthusiastic use of its power envelope.

The last one was better in some ways and under-delivering in others, but it was still a hard-riding rocket that was more about the projection of speed than the delivery of it.

The new JCW has both.

The speed is there, undoubtedly, but the civility endowed by the all-new BMW Group front-drive architecture has softened it just enough to let it use more of its power, more of the time.

Read this part quietly, in case they twig and change direction: MINI’s engineers know that riding softer is very often the fastest, most controllable way to set the car up and this time they’ve somehow snuck that idea past the brand’s overly enthusiastic product planning department. Oh, the latter has had its wins (more of which later), but it’s a big feather in engineering’s cap.

Granted, some JCW owners love that the vertical feedback on their older models was so honest its drivers could tell whether they’d run over a beetle’s body or its legs. But with the front tyres already taxed by power and torque and steering, it was probably time to give them a fair shot at doing everything in their remit without skipping and fizzing over bumps, too.

They have worked hard at lowering unsprung mass and the multi-link rear suspension system is lighter and stronger. The front-end gets the most work, with stiffer (compared to the Cooper S) springs and dampers, new wheel bearings, a new, tubular anti-roll bar and strut mounts that provide three load paths for energy to follow.

Toting 170kW still isn’t enough to convince MINI to give the JCW a mechanical limited-slip differential, because it insists a brake-controlled electronic “locking diff” also gives it a torque-vectoring capability. 

It has answered criticisms of torque steer and inconsistent steering feedback by a relatively complex engineering solution that winds up delivering equal length half-shafts. You don’t want to look too closely back from there, though, because you’ll find they had to engineer a shorter propshaft that runs from the back of the gearbox and beneath the engine to arrive at the front track’s mid-point.

Outside from there sit 17-inch alloy wheels and 330mm discs with four-piston Brembo calipers stomping on them.

If you want even more dynamic ability out of the JCW, you can go for the optional 18-inch wheels and tyres and/or the variable damper control system (as fitted to the test cars), which eschews magnetic dampers for a twin-reservoir system for the damper fluid and switches between them when you choose Sport mode.

As you should be able to tell from all of that, getting significantly more engine will usually tingle the Spidey Senses of the chassis and suspension engineers and the new JCW definitely has significantly more engine. There’s 20Nm more in the JCW (now at 320Nm) than in the Cooper S and it has 29 more kiloWatts as well. Plus, it’s about 10 per cent up on and 23 per cent up on torque over the old JCW.

It wasn’t an hour of software coding to get there, either. It starts where the Cooper S motor stops and adds new pistons, an all-new turbocharger, a new intercooler and a freer flowing exhaust system.

The upshot is a four-cylinder direct-injection turbocharged motor with variable valve timing and lift. It’s what BMW would call a TwinPower engine, but MINI isn’t BMW. Sort of.

It’s a hugely undersquare engine, with a bore diameter of just 82mm compared to the 94.6mm stroke, so all the cursory signs point to a torquey sort of engine rather than a high revver.

That’s how it pans out in reality, too. It reaches its torque peak (320Nm) at just 1250rpm – or only around 500 revs beyond its idle point – and it’s tough to immediately recall any other petrol engine with performance pretensions doing the same thing. It doesn’t hit-and-quit with torque, either, because the 2.0-litre motor holds the peak until 4800rpm before trailing away.

Of course, it can trail away up at that end of the rev range without any negative performance implications, because the power is well on its way to its 170kW peak by then. It crests its wave at 5200rpm and holds it all the way to 6000rpm.

It’s a very, very broad range of performance and it means that it’s nearly impossible to catch the JCW in the wrong gear. Stamp on the throttle, in any gear, and it just pulls and pulls.

There are six-speed manual and automatic transmissions beneath it, too, and there are solid arguments for both of them.

The first one normally bandied about is that the manual is the one for enthusiasts, and it’s enthusiasts who buy JCWs. And it’s cheaper. And now there’s an engine cut-out to make the shifts smoother and heel-and-toe for you.

The counter argument is that the automatic is not only faster, but more economical and easier to drive quickly, thanks to its paddle shifters keeping the driver’s hands on the wheel.

Either way, both cars top out at 246km/h, so take your pick, but take the following on board: it’s a better car with the automatic, but it’s slightly more fun with the manual.

But it’s not like the economy thing isn’t significant. The manual uses 6.7L/100km and the automatic sits at 5.7L/100km on the NEDC cycle. That’s around the 20 per cent mark.

Oddly, the manual’s figure is a litre up on the Cooper S, while the auto version only adds 0.2L/100km to the sporty sibling.

Grown-ups will take all of that into account and buy the automatic version, because it’ll be better to live with every day, leaving the manual for incurably romantic recidivists.

The motor starts very deeply for a four-cylinder engine and stays there, with a depth of tone that’s suspiciously not much like a four-cylinder engine’s depth of tone. It’s smooth, though, and moves off quietly enough when it’s not in its sport mode, which you move into by twisting a plastic ring around the gear lever.

It’s a lot louder in sport mode, and it’s more fun. It responds faster, too, and crackles and pops and burbles loudly on the engine’s overrun. (The Germans have a specific word for this, and it’s become so prevalent in anything remotely quick that it’s high time the English did, too.)

The key to the JCW on the road is its broad engine strength. That leaves it absolutely able to hold its own against most cars in on-road situations, especially if the roads begin to get crooked.

It can be left a gear higher than you’d normally use without losing any pace whatsoever out of corners (and with less wear on the tortured front tyres) and sometimes even two gears taller won’t hurt much, either.

You can still get the front-end to push wide on acceleration, but that’s now almost exclusive to very tight corners and, even then, only on a racetrack. In what you’d normally consider the right gear (say, second), you can make the inside tyre fire up to the fry point, leaving the outside one too much to do on its own, regardless of what MINI says about its clever not-differential.

But you negate this very simply by using third gear instead and driving the car oo its torque band instead of its power band, and it’s no slower on the track, which means it will be no slower in the real world. After all, it gets through the 80-120km/h sprint faster than a 911 Carrera S…

The only issue with this strategy is that the automatic is a bit overly keen to snap off a downshift when you push firmly on the throttle, even when it’s in sport mode. That, and it shifts up automatically when it hits the redline.

Otherwise, it’s a perfectly happy companion, changing gear briskly whenever you pull a paddle, cracking through downshifts quickly and then settling in for nice, soft changes when you want to drive in a more relaxed fashion in other modes.

We only got the manual version on the racetrack and found that it shifts nicely enough, even if there’s a touch of rubberiness on the diagonal gates. The pedal weighting is good and it’s a hoot. On full throttle, you can shift from second to fourth without losing much ground to the cars around you, so strong is the engine.

It’s also a very easy car to adjust when the grip runs out, which inevitably happens at the front-end. You can just ease off the throttle to tuck the nose back towards you line and power on again, with the car responding quickly to every subtle difference in weight transfer.

The steering weight is nice and firm, especially in Sport mode, and it still has that MINI-esque feeling of being tremendously quick just off-centre.

It’s not as crisp and pointy in its feel as the old car, but it’s more effective and definitely faster.

Yet it doesn’t feel quite as much at home on short, sharp corners as once it did, especially at the front half of the bend, and can fall into understeering stances. That’s odd, given that it only weighs 1220kg, but the increase in composure means almost all of the twitchiness has gone, and some people might miss that.

But if the roads open up into third- or fourth-gear corners, you’ll notice the step up in chassis maturity immediately.

The car feels longer than its 3874mm overall length and it handles longer sweepers far better than its 2495mm wheelbase suggests it should.

It’s very composed, able to shift its weight backwards to the rear tyres, forwards to live on understeer or a compromised, more neutral stance. It dives into apexes like it was born for it, and though the Pirelli Cinturatos don’t deliver quite the delicacy of steering input to match, the torque steer of old has been largely tamed.

It’s like MINI has taken a lot of the old enthusiasm, put it in a bottle and then poured it over the Cooper S.

That maturity isn’t matched inside, though, where the product planners have stuck rigidly to the clinic results. That’s how they explained the delivery of so many chequered flag decals inside the cabin, including a faux tacho painted incrementally around the round MMI screen, creating one, big tacho. It even lights up in red as you approach the redline. And it looks naff.

Our car had MINI’s optional bucket seats, which gripped superbly from the sides and weren’t intrusive at all, but otherwise the interior upgrades are bits and pieces and lots of red hints around the dash.

The bodywork additions are more subtle than in the past, but still convincing, especially with the low-sited fog lights dumped in favour of more brake cooling and a wider, fatter grille sitting between the standard LED headlights.

So, yes, it’s definitely the fastest and most powerful MINI JCW ever made. And it’s the best, too, even though it’s also the most grown up. Because it’s the most grown up.

2015 MINI JCW pricing and specifications:
On sale: July
Price: From $47,400 (Automatic: $49,950)
Engine: 2.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-petrol
Output: 170kW/320Nm
Transmission: Six-speed manual and automatic
Fuel: 6.7L/100km (NEDC)
CO2: 155g/km (NEDC)
Safety rating: TBA

What we liked:
>> Broad performance envelope
>> Monster braking power
>> Cracking point-to-point speed

Not so much:
>> Feels too grown up
>> Traditionally expensive
>> Naff fake tacho on MMI screen