Why the Mini JCW is a brilliant swansong for petrol hot hatches
While it might have been tempting for us to pick some rare-groove luxury car or revered Italian performance machine as a shoo-in for our Future Classic accolade (awarded in association with our friends at Classic & Sports Car magazine), there’s a surprisingly affordable new car that’s staring us in the face this year.
Soon enough, it’s going to become the very last petrol-powered hot supermini on the market – which surely makes it collectable in just about anyone’s book.
For now, the Mini John Cooper Works has one avenue of competition for that status, because Toyota’s on-again-off-again sales saga with the admittedly excellent GR Yaris hasn’t quite finally blown itself out. But Toyota guides us to expect that car to depart before long, not to return. And even now, for as long as it is on sale, it’s hardly a bargain, at £48,000.
The hot three-door Mini JCW, then, might already be regarded as the only truly compact, genuinely powerful, genuinely affordable and genuinely fun petrol-sipping hot hatchback there is left to buy.
It’s powered by a fiercer version of the 2.0-litre turbocharged four from the Cooper S, turned up to 228bhp and a punchy 280lb ft of twist. It will do 62mph from rest in a whisker over 6.0sec (only a whisker behind its electric sibling) and 155mph flat out.
And it can be bought from just £33,550 – or more likely around £36,000 once you’ve picked the colour and options you like best. Still seems pretty reasonable for the price of a mid-sized, Chinese-brand electric crossover, right?
The Mini JCW is all about making life fun. While its busy, slightly restive ride can get a little wearing over long journeys and uneven country roads, it makes for indefatigable agility and liveliness when the car is at its zappy best.
That Mini doesn’t make the car’s stability control fully switchable any more may be a development that really keen drivers and track-day regulars won’t appreciate.
But none of the Mini JCW’s electronics are irksome, overbearing or hard to neuter, and the ESC isn’t such a killjoy as to stop the car from swivelling its hips on a trailing throttle around roundabouts and hairpin bends and then snorting off into the middle distance with terrier-like abandon.
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