2012 Mini John Cooper Works Coupe - Prototype Drive

“With a car like this,” Rauno Aaltonen says, “sportier is a bad word, because the extreme, if you take it too far, would be wipers on the side screens.”

Aaltonen knows from side-screen wipers. Here we have one of the world’s great rally drivers—an original Flying Finn, a spry 73-year-old former champion who has spent much of his working life on dirt. He is standing at a paved track in Austria, referring to the prototype Mini John Cooper Works coupe we’re here to drive. He is cautioning us against wanting too much.

Good advice, but with the coupe’s looks, much is promised. The Mini JCW coupe—and that’s what we’ll call it, because “Mini John Cooper Works coupe” just sounds all Anglophile Rain Man is a two-seat, fixed-roof version of the Mini Cooper hatchback. It shares a platform with the current Mini convertible and upcoming Mini roadster, and it’s intended to round out the brand’s lineup in a flashy, attention-getting fashion. It is not— not , insist Mini marketing people—supposed to be the fastest or the most hard-core dog in the litter. Which is kind of confusing, given that it looks the part.

The premise is simple. British tuners like Broadspeed and Universal Power built two-place, Mini-based funsters in the 1960s, so the coupe has historical precedent. To keep costs down, the convertible’s unibody was essentially ported over. The coupe gains steel reinforcements in the sills and trunk but is otherwise a convertible from the beltline down. The windshield angle drops by 13 degrees, and a helmet-like steel roof has been welded over the cockpit, complete with a long trunklid and two spoilers. The rearmost spoiler is active, rising automatically at 50 mph and producing a claimed 88 pounds of downforce.

The rest is details. Driveline choices are unchanged from the rest of the Mini lineup, which is to say, everything from ordinary (122-hp Cooper) to feisty (208-hp John Cooper Works). Europe gets a 143-hp diesel four that Americans will never, ever see. All coupes come standard with a six-speed manual. Cooper and Cooper S buyers can opt for a six-speed automatic. The suspension geometry, the wheelbase, the wheel choices—almost everything else is standard-issue Mini. Given the ordinary Mini’s chassis talent, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The big surprise is weight. The coupe is about 55 pounds porkier than a standard Mini hatch, thanks partly to the chassis reinforcements and active spoiler. (The latter alone adds 12 pounds.) This is a trivial bump, but if you’re giving up a rear seat, you should gain lightness, not lose it. Thanks to the new windshield, height falls by about an inch, to 54.5 inches. A whopping 10 cubic feet of cargo can fit underneath the trunklid, more if you take advantage of the standard pass-through between the two seats.

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2012 Mini John Cooper Works Coupe - Prototype Drive

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