Midrand – Mini is adding some JCW flavour to its 5-door Cooper S model, but you’d better hurry as only 20 of them are being made available to South African consumers.
The Special Edition comes with a tasty assortment of go-faster and look-faster bits, including a John Cooper Works tuning kit and sports exhaust system. As a result the 2-litre turbopetrol engine now pushes 155kW, 14kW more than the standard version, as well as 300Nm of torque. Mini’s six-speed automatic is the only gearbox offered.
No performance figures have been released as yet, but expect a slight improvement on the regular S’s 6.8-second 0-100km/h time. Sportier suspension settings are also in place to sharpen the handling.
Decoration comes in the form of John Cooper Works exterior and interior packages. What this means on the outside is ‘Melting Silver’ metallic paint, a set of two-spoke 18” alloy wheels, gloss black headlight and taillight surrounds, carbon fibre mirror covers and exhaust finishes as well as a black roof.
JCW’s interior perk-up bring cross-punch black leather seats to the party and a panoramic sunroof is standard.
All of this excitement will set you back R515 726, a cool R83 700 more than the Cooper S auto that it’s based on.