Styling
Although this fourth-generation (speaking in modern, BMW-era terms, natch) MINI Cooper, codenamed the F66, is basically just the old
Mk3 F56 three-door body with some of the styling accoutrements of the
all-electric J01 grafted onto it, this petrol-powered JCW and the zero-emission JCW Electric do look mighty similar at first glance. There's lots of black detailing, big alloy wheels (although 18-inch 'Lap Spoke' rims are an £800 option on the ICE JCW, whereas they're standard on the EV; you get 17s for the petrol car if you don't fork out extra at ordering time), spoilers, chunky bumpers, flared-out side skirts, and plenty of those red, white and black 'JCW' chequered flag logos to spy.
The overall effect of the MINI JCW is therefore pleasing, as it has a squat and purposeful stance that indicates it's something a bit more serious than a Cooper S or Cooper C, for example. But, if you keep perusing, you start to pick up on the subtle differences that separate the ICE and EV JCW twins. Such as a proper, open radiator grille at the front of this car, to feed cooling air to the 2.0-litre turbo four-pot under the bonnet. A round, centrally mounted, perfectly circular exhaust-pipe exit at the back, whereas the EV has no such thing (obviously). A different design of roof spoiler perched atop the bootlid. Fewer black graphics on said tailgate hatch. It's subtle stuff, granted, and there's not much in it between the pair, but we marginally prefer the look of this ICE JCW to the smoothed-off aesthetic of the EV.
Interior
Again, inside there's hardly any way to distinguish you're in the petrol JCW rather than the one propelled by electricity. This is because a rev counter is not an obvious and immediate feature of the 9.4-inch circular touchscreen infotainment display, even in this 2.0-litre car (there are tacho-related shift-up graphics in the driver's head-up display in Go-Kart mode, though), so you'd have to stare long and hard at side-by-side pics of the J01 versus F66 cabins to note that, yes, the sculpted fascia on the dash and the air vents are an ever-so-slightly-different design in the two MINIs. Therefore, with the usual red-themed details - stitching, flag graphic intertwined into the passenger's half of the fabric dashboard, that red strap which forms the bottom 'spoke' of the sporty steering wheel - some more JCW logos scattered about the place, and a set of bucket seats bolted in for good measure, the interior of this car feels as high-quality, prestigious and up-to-date as any other MINI in the present catalogue.
Practicality
Totally contrary to what the Issigonis original ever stood for - the whole reason the 1959 Mini pioneered a transverse engine mounting was that you could subsequently provide enough room in the passenger compartment for four people, while maintaining the minimal possible road footprint outwith - a BMW-era three-door MINI is a tragic effort at packaging a small car. It's not merely the physical exterior size that bothers us (so we're not one of those types who must sneer 'huh, it's not very mini any more, is it?' whenever they see a 21st-century MINI hatch), but the fact that the JCW favours the incredibly deep dashboard construct up front, which looks great admittedly, at the expense of any rear legroom whatsoever.
Furthermore, any three-door MINI in the showroom right now - be that an F66 or a J01 - is a strict four-seater, with no centre-rear belt, and then to top it off this petrol car has even less boot space than the JCW Electric. Both have a feeble 210 litres with all 'seats' (there are only really two, but we'll go with MINI's four-seater ruse here) in use, yet the ICE JCW only musters up 725 litres with the largely useless second row of chairs folded down; the EV has 800 litres in the same circumstances. Sure, MINI will happily counter and say that if you want a practical, roomy-in-the-back car from its catalogue, then either the
Countryman or all-new
Aceman can provide such a thing. But, among its hatchback relations, the MINI three-door is a poor choice from a practicality perspective. It comes to something when the much-dinkier
Fiat 500e (it's 244mm shorter from nose-to-tail, with 173mm subtracted from the wheelbase, and it's also 61mm narrower in the body than the MINI) doesn't feel like it is markedly worse for either rear-passenger or boot space in the slightest.
Performance
This F66 JCW uses the familiar 2.0-litre, turbocharged petrol engine with four cylinders that was in service in the older MINI families. It's the 'B48' unit, which we've seen with outputs as high as 306hp/450Nm in various all-wheel-drive MINIs in recent years (with one front-driven exception, the mental
GP3), and it's continuing to serve in a higher 300hp/400Nm configuration in the present-day
JCW Countryman ALL4.
For this three-door model, it makes no more power than its immediate predecessor (231hp), but torque has been ramped up by 60Nm to a new peak of 380Nm for the latest hot hatch, delivered across a wide plateau from 1,500-4,000rpm. This makes the automatic-only (boooo, MINI! BOOOOOOO!) JCW suitably brisk, running 0-62mph in 6.1 seconds and capable of going on to a 155mph top whack. It is, however, two-tenths slower than the JCW Electric (258hp/350Nm), despite a colossal 325kg weight advantage to the petrol - its relative tardiness off the line is due to the different ways that torque is delivered in EVs compared to ICE cars.
Nevertheless, the JCW petrol is much more enjoyable to drive quickly than the JCW Electric, mainly due to the noises you get. OK, the 'rumbles and thuds' of the exhaust system you hear in the 2.0-litre MINI are, in fact, wholly synthesised by the in-car sound system and they're not in the remotest bit audible to bystanders (that's an EU noise emissions thing), so you might get annoyed by the fakery on display in the ICE JCW. And the B48 is not the most tuneful four-pot in the world, when all's said and done.
Yet it still sounds better than the strange whirrings the JCW Electric cooks up, while the petrol-powered hot hatch is far superior at putting its ample power to the ground in an effective fashion. There's much less of the rampant torque-steer in this car than you get in the EV, which might seem strange because a) neither of these JCWs has a limited-slip differential of any sort fitted to their leading axle, and b) the petrol makes 30Nm more than the Electric. But we'll explain why the traction and power deployment is better in the ICE JCW in the next section.
As for fuel economy and running costs, then undoubtedly the JCW Electric is going to be better on your wallet in the long term, especially if you can avail of cheap domestic electricity rates by charging the car overnight at home on an AC hook-up regularly. That said, the theoretical 250-mile range of the EV is going to be a lot less if you start to use its full performance more often than not (and that's if you can stand its frenzied suspension set-up, of course), and as a,
ahem, spirited drive in the petrol JCW still gave back 24.8mpg overall, then even if you cane the 2.0-litre car for its entire 44-litre (9.7-gallon) tank you should get 240 miles out of it. Driven more sensibly, anything beyond 30mpg - which is eminently reasonable from a larger capacity turbo engine running at low revs thanks to the seven-speed DCT gearbox - should see the JCW petrol go well past the 300-mile mark to a fill-up.
Ride & Handling
It takes barely 50 metres in the petrol JCW to realise this is how the MINI hot hatch is supposed to be. Make no mistake, this is still a firmly sprung car with damping that's tuned for sporty driving, so there are times when it's not particularly comfortable and it can bounce around a little on particularly rucked-up roads. But these occasions are the exception, not the rule, and for most of the time this 2.0-litre MINI feels much more planted, exploitable and - ultimately - enjoyable than the JCW Electric.
This is because it has adaptive suspension, whereas the EV variant has its own chassis tune to cope with its massively increased weight. This alone results in a vast dynamic chasm opening up between the ICE JCW and the JCW Electric, and it's one that cannot be bridged - even by the greater environmental good of running a zero-emission three-door instead of one powered by fossil fuels.
Not only is this MINI JCW much more tolerable and pleasant to travel along in when you're not going quickly in it, the car is far more trustworthy in the corners, because as the driver you have much less fear that it will be violently upset by only a modest mid-bend bump than the Electric. So you can press on in it, revelling in steering that is good (but not great) and the incredible uptick in agility brought about by the petrol's comparatively trim 1.4-tonne kerb weight. This MINI is way more eager to get turned into the apex smartly, while it feels like it less prone to fun-sapping understeer too.
As we said in the Performance section, the ridiculously firm suspension on the JCW Electric is why it can't put its power to the road in a controllable fashion - whereas the JCW petrol can. So while the on-paper stats might suggest the EV has the ICE's measure in this regard, we can tell you that from a purely subjective, seat-of-the-pants experience it's the 2.0-litre JCW MINI which feels considerably faster in practice.
Summing this section up, we wouldn't say the F66 JCW is the best fast MINI we've driven in the past 25 years, you understand. But it brings back some of the rawness that has perhaps been dialled out of the larger, more urbane JCWs such as the current Countryman ALL4 in recent times, without utterly compromising everything the car does as in the stupidly firmly suspended JCW Electric. And as there is now, at the time of writing, just the one natural rival for the MINI JCW petrol - that being the underwhelming and near-to-death
Volkswagen Polo GTI (the special-order, limited-numbers
Toyota GR Yaris doesn't count, because it's not really a B-segment hot hatch in the traditional sense, is it?) - then this 2.0-litre car feels more special and much more desirable than the flawed JCW Electric. Sorry folks, but in this ICE v EV battle, it's an easy one-in-the-eye for the future propulsion type; the petrol JCW is markedly better in several key aspects.
Value
In certain markets, where governments seem to have made sense of the mandated move to electric power and set up their taxation systems to favour EVs over ICE, the choice between the MINI JCW and its JCW Electric relation is much harder to call, despite the dynamic deficits of the latter. This is because, for example, in Ireland (our nearest right-hand-drive neighbours) the EV is €12,000 (about £10,240) cheaper than the petrol. And that's the way it should be: heavily incentivise the zero-emission route.
Here, though? In good old Blighty? Nope. The JCW Electric starts at £34,905, this ICE variant is £33,265. And you're surely not able to make a cogent case for picking a vastly inferior car that's £1,640 dearer to buy in the first place, are you, even if you start trying to claim you'll get it all back on running costs during a two- or three-year lease/PCP? You're not, are you? Are you?!
Seriously?!
Verdict
There are currently five different models of John Cooper Works MINI available, and we've driven four of them - the only one left to check out is the JCW variant of the updated
Convertible, which uses the same 2.0-litre, 231hp four-banger as this F66 three-door.
And if you asked us to rank them all, it'd be easy. This JCW petrol is top of the pile, for its keen and rewarding - but not flawless - driving manners, along with punchy performance and lashings of JCW style inside and out. The JCW Countryman would be next in, thanks to being the quickest of them all in a straight line (it can be a bit dull to drive, though), and then we guess we'd slot the soft-top into the pile next. That's because, unless MINI has made a right hash of the JCW Convertible's suspension, it can't drive anything like as badly as the JCW Electric (a very distant fourth on our list) or the unacceptable JCW Aceman (last, but only just behind its three-door, zero-emission relation).
So no, it's not very progressive of us to say that a MINI hot hatch which emits 154g/km of CO
2 is much the preferable choice out of it and an equivalent that has no tailpipe nasties whatsoever, but regrettably that's where we're at. Because it's an absolute dynamic demolition job by the ICE JCW on the electric one.
