[Beester]

In february I got to drive a MINI one for a weekend. That has been the start of my addiction

At the moment I'm in the process of ordering a mini cooper, and as a final testcase I arranged a testdrive last saturday.

I arrived at the dealer at 2 pm, in the afternoon. They needed just a copy of my ID-card. The salesmanager walked to the lot and gave me the keys to a Chili Red-White roof and rims cooper. 4500 miles on the clock, kaleido cloth seats, no ASC+T, airco, sportseats, leather steeringwheel.

I got to have it for 3 hours so I gave it a thorough workout.

The remarks:
GOOD!
It had the 16" wheels and SS+, but the ride wasn't realy that harsh. Just sporty and firm. I LIKE

Realy sporty if you keep it in the powerband! But I was a bit dissapointed at the difference between the one and the cooper. Not that it's not sporty enough, just that I didn't feel that much of a difference for a 25BHP difference. Of course I drove the one a couple of months ago so probably my mind is playing tricks on me.

The brakes are wonderfull! I made some emergency stops, no fading at all. Those brakes realy bite, and you develop some serious G-forces coming to a halt from 90mph to zero. I expected the ABS to kick in (push back the pedals) but that didn't happen. I LIKE

The soundsystem was the standard radio-boost with cd-frontloader. It was more then sufficient for me, specialy since I only played with it for a while... I just like the sound of the engine too much It's got a bit of an alfa-romeo whine to it. I LIKE

SO SO

No boardcomputer so I couldn't realy estimate fuelconsumption. Maybe for the better cause I was realy pushing the car.

Shifting is nice and smooth. The only real worrying thing was the shifterknob. I was speedshifting and in full acceleration shifting from 2nd to 3rd I pulled the knob of. That was realy scary. As something been done to fix that?? I could just push the knob back on but it didn't seem firm enough.

The interior is very nice but there are too many cheap plastics. Specialy the inside of the A pillar.

All in all I had a fantastic time driving it... and I'm going to visit the dealer in 2 weeks to sign on for a cooper. Just a bit worried about the shifterknob tho.