| Long Term Test | MINI Clubman John Cooper Works |
Been anywhere interesting?
Long term test cars tend not to have a very interesting existence, and the MINI, we're sorry to say, was in that category. We piled plenty of miles onto the odometer, but during the vast majority it was dirty, full of stuff and more likely to be nursery-bound than track-bound. A waste, really.
The great thing was that it made all those journeys quite brilliant. The JCW has such an addictive power swell, is so tractable on the throttle, the noise so more-ish and the steering so precise that roundabouts (empty ones) often became tyre durability tests. Nice.
Anything stand out...?
We're not given to naming our cars here at
Car Enthusiast, but the Clubman JCW became known as Linford: it's British and very fast, but all anyone seems to want to talk about it the big bit in the middle.
We didn't really call it Linford, but it's true that the Clubman always provoked a conversation with anyone remotely interested in cars or MINIs (you don't have to be in the former group to be in the latter, we've found). Unanimously the car was loved, but anyone that witnessed the process of getting two small children in the back, then trying to load the boot, would inevitably declare the car 'a bit of a nightmare'. Or words to that effect.
...and for the wrong reasons?
See above. When we took on a Clubman for the long term, we really thought we'd be able to figure out what the hell it's supposed to be. We can't. It did just about manage to seat two kids in child seats, but getting them in is tricky even when there's nothing parked either side of the car. And children usually require some form of wheeled mobility device as well, which is generally transported in the boot; our buggy necessitated removal of the boot's false floor and resulted in the erasing of all traces of rear visibility (such as it was in the first place).
We didn't care, however, because on the days when kids were elsewhere the JCW was such a riot.
See the review for details.
Where next?
Sadness. There was a genuine sense of it when the MINI left our driveway for the last time, something we couldn't say about the
Volvo S40 DRIVe that preceded it. Thankfully, the blow is cushioned by the thought of its replacement, which is in many ways the opposite of the JCW, though equally polarising. We're sure we'll be happy drivers (there's your clue).
