Mini Celebrity

Convertibles are primarily about open-air motoring. The ability to sit in a car, and yet look up at the limitless blue sky during the day and maybe a star-studded one while the sun is asleep. They’re about feeling the wind in your hair. And since I’m the person with the most hair by far in the team, it fell to me to review the Mini Cooper convertible. I first set eyes on the Mini Cooper convertible with its top down, but it wasn’t until mid-morning that I got to step into it. The peak of summer in Mumbai isn’t the best time to leave the top down and drive, so I left the top up for most of the day.

The Mini looks tiny at first glance. It’s only when you pull up next to a Swift or Fabia when you realise how long and wide it really is. It is also when you realise where the Swift and Fabia have taken their design inspiration from! The car you see on these pages has a few optional extras, like the white stripes on the bonnet. The iconic shape has been retained by BMW, which is a very good thing – it is extremely recognizable by anyone, and helped along by its fame as a member of the cast in movies such as The Italian Job and Players. The stance is very sporty, with its low roof, high waistline, wide haunches and dinner-plate sized wheels in comparison to the castor wheels that are the usual fare for regular small cars in our marketplace.

Get in and you’ll find the interior quirky yet functional. There is a massive circular central display that is rimmed by a speedo with a floating needle. Every single person who sat in the car assumed (not unfairly, in this age of touchscreen everything) that the screen was a touchscreen system – and it wasn’t. It was merely an iDrive system in drag, and finding the right hardware to manipulate it isn’t intuitive to a first-time user, even one that is used to BMWs. Once the code was cracked, however, it was as easy as pie. The steering wheel has an analog tacho and a digital speedo attached to the column the way the Chevy Beat does – the optional sports steering wheel adds meters to the instrument cluster and buttons behind the wheel to shift gears.The polar beige interior upholstery, blue roof and 16-inch alloy wheelsof our test car are options, too. The Mini’s options list is longer than our constitution, and has just as many ifs and buts: you can have the white stripes, but only if the roof is white for the hatch. Black stripes are for black roofs only. You can line pretty much anything with chrome, up to and including the cup holders, central speedo and window line. The audio system deserves a pat on the back – the Harman-Kadon system is top-notch and deserves praise. The images suggest that when a six-footer like me gets in the driver’s seat, there is room only for children or amputees in the back, but the looks deceive. With a little adjustment, four normal-sized people can sit comfortably in the Mini for short journeys. The Mini convertible has earned five stars in the Euro-NCAP safety ratings for occupant protection thanks to ABS with EBD, four airbags and a pop-up rollver hoop.It also offers ISOFIX points for child seats in the rear and a brake lamp which flashes under heavy braking, which makes it one of safest little cars on the road.

From the driver’s seat you look out at the world through a small, upright windscreen that is a complete antithesis to today’s modern monobox-designed hatchbacks that have large windscreens. With the roof up, there are massive blind spots where fabric occupies the area where the C-pillars would be. With the roof stowed away that blind spot disappears, but another one pops up in the central rear-view mirror to even things out. The door-mounted mirrors are large and functional for a European car. It is extremely claustrophobic in the rear seat with the top up, and very windy with the top down – it certainly is a hard life for the back-benchers in the Mini!

Our test car was equipped with a 1.6-litre four cylinder petrol engine that generated 122bhp@6000rpm and torque to the tune of 160Nm@4250rpm. Top speed is claimed to be 203kph with a 0-100kph time of 9.1 seconds, although it feels slower from the seat of the pants. This power was fed through a six-speed automatic gearbox that offered manual control as well. The engine has a most pleasing note that is best heard with the top down, and for any progress to be made has to be revved hard. But that’s not what the gearbox wants to do – leave it in D and it insists on maximum fuel economy like its life depended on it. This wouldn’t have been cause for complaint in a normal hatchback, but in a stiffly-sprung Mini it is out of place. Ask it to downshift by prodding the throttle in this mode, and it feels like there’s a little Parliament under the bonnet that debates (and adjourns for lunch, tea and dinner) before approving the request to downshift. Let up on the throttle even slightly, and it zips up through the gears again to the tallest available gear, making it very annoying to live with while overtaking slow-moving traffic. Tip the gear lever left, though, and things improve. The car holds on to a gear lower than it would in regular Drive mode, shifts down earlier, but it still doesn’t seem enough. So you start tipping the gear lever back and forth to change gears manually – and the Mini transforms into a spunky little car which has to be revved to extract the maximum out of it. This is a lot of fun, once you get used to the super-quick steering and work up the confidence to throw it into bends instead of easing it into them. The Cooper isn’t about finesse and managing grip. It isn’t a hound, this car; it’s a terrier than bounds about with unbridled enthusiasm and the best thing you could do is to give in to it. There isn’t much power, and the gearbox spoils the party with its dim-witted downshifts and lack of paddles (even on the ‘sports’ steering wheel that has audio control buttons) but the handling relegates all these faults to the background. But it also brings one to the fore: the ride.

The ride is stiff on any Mini Cooper, because its USP is its handling. This becomes especially noticeable to us in the Indian marketplace because every manufacturer softens its suspension settings for India – but not Mini. To top it off, we had the optional 16-inch wheels instead of the standard 15-inchers. As a result, the Mini tells you whether it ran over a gravel chip that fell off from the truck in front or a smoothened pebble from the side of the road. Things weren’t helped by the scuttle shake that is a hallmark of convertibles – on more than one occasion on a bumpy section it felt like the front and the rear were slightly disconnected. This is amplified when the roof is up because of the creaks that emanate from it. Hit a bump in the middle of a bend, and the steering wheel skips in your hand. If you’ve got the habit of holding the wheel tightly, you might just end up darting a little off your intended course. It is all very scary and dramatic. And absolutely exhilarating. This lack of direction on the car’s part should have had me saying “Ha! This is a recipe for disaster!” and instead I’m smiling at the way the steering wheel felt alive in my hands like no other car I’ve driven so far. The ride improves vastly with four people in the cabin and as much luggage as possible in the boot, but that isn’t going to happen often in this car.

Then there’s the fabric roof – I couldn’t park it anywhere conspicuous for fear of someone doing something untoward to it. It does a very good job of keeping the heat and noise out, and the cool air from the climate control inside. No one really notices it until you hit the button at the top of the windscreen and magic fairies start stowing the roof into the tiny 170-litre boot. You can even open just the bit above the front seats for a targa-top experience, which is nice. On a cool morning it’s better than the automatic dual-zone climate control. Just don’t do it in a crowded place, else not only will people rubberneck and cause accidents, they will also follow you around and bend over your shoulder to look at what your car has to offer on the inside. Welcome to India, where the concept of personal space is non-existent. Drop the top on a lonely canyon road with a good surface when the sun isn’t high in the sky, drive with rhythm and enthusiasm instead of aggression, and you’ll get as close as possible to motoring nirvana as is possible for mortals. The handling, the sporty exhaust note and the novelty of having nothing but the sky over your noggin all come together to give you a sublime experience. If you’d like to keep your hairstyle intact, Mini also provides a complicated foldable wind deflector that is stowed away in the boot.

The Mini Cooper convertible isn’t for the faint of heart, because once you fold the roof down you’ll be an instant celebrity. My wife loved it, and the price of Rs 30.7 lakh (ex-showroom) didn’t faze the otherwise level-headed woman one bit. If you’re single and want to mingle or have a small child or two, get yourself a Mini Cooper convertible and soak up the attention. Just remember to not get one in pink if you’re not from the fairer sex. If you want one for the driving pleasure, you’re better off with a Cooper S hardtop.