This edition of Side Glances originally appeared in the August, 2003 issue of R&T



"Have you driven the new Mini Cooper S?" my friend Mike Mosiman asked over the phone late last autumn.

"No," I replied.

"Oh, man! You gotta drive this thing! I just bought one last week in gray and white, and I absolutely love it. I'll bring it right over so you can take a test drive."

That promise would have been quite rea­sonable if Mike lived in a nearby town or neighborhood. But he doesn't.

He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, and I live in southern Wisconsin.

Nevertheless, Mike showed up at our door about 20 minutes later. Okay, that's a slight exaggeration; it was actually about two days later, but it seemed as though I'd just hung up and there was a Mini idling in our driveway. This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened.

Last summer, Mike rode out on his new motorcycle, a BMW R1150RT, so I could take that for a test ride. Unlike me, Mike tends to buy fast, reliable vehicles that are undaunted by vast distances. I buy stuff that blows up on the way to the mailbox.

Naturally, the minute Mike arrived we took the Mini for a long drive in the country.

The first thing that struck me about this supercharged car was not only that it was very quick, but that it was deceptively fast, cruising effortlessly at a relaxed and quiet 75-85 mph. Not at all the hyper wind-up toy I'd been expecting.

"Jeez," I said, "if I owned this car I'd get tickets all the time. We're going 80 and it feels like about 54 mph."

At that moment we crested a rise with the wheels practically off the ground and flew past a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria with an external spotlight, a whip antenna and writing on the door.

I stood on the brakes and looked in the mirror. The Crown Vic stood on his brakes too.

"Oh, brother!" I shouted, eschewing the sort of expletive I might normally use when not quoting myself in a family mag­ azine. "I just got all my points back, after two bloody years without a ticket!"

But— miracle of miracles— the cop did not pursue. His brake lights eased off and he kept going, perhaps with larger fish to fry. Or larger cars to catch. Had we been thrown back, like an undersized trout?

BMW

If we had, it was all right with me.

Mike let me drive over the back hills of Wisconsin for more than an hour, and I liked the almost limitless grip of the Mini in switchbacks, and its easy, quick steer­ing. As a great fan of the old Cooper S of the 1960s, I found the whole car a little more rubbery and detached in its steering and suspension feel than the mechanically taut original, but I guess that was to be ex­pected. There is almost no car on earth as fun, direct, light and communicative as the original Mini, so it was a hard act to follow in a car that has airbags, crashworthiness and all the other modern baggage. Given those compromises, the new Mini is proba­bly about as good as it can be.

Mike and I came back to the house in late afternoon, and he said, "Okay, now you and Barb have to take a drive by yourselves." He grinned at me conspiratorially over Barb's shoulder, like someone who had just dropped a few tabs of acid in the punch bowl and was proudly standing by to witness the inevitable transformations of personality that would soon take place.

Off we went for a short drive into the country, while Mike waited on our porch swing with a beer and our three confused dogs, who appeared to be wondering if we'd traded our home and dogs for a new Mini.

Barb had fun behind the wheel, but when we pulled into the driveway, she looked around at the rather flashy art-deco dash and door panels and said, "I really like driving this car, but I don't know if I could stand to look at this interior every day. It's too contrived. I like the simplicity of the old Mini better."

Which pretty much summed up my own thoughts. The car looked right on the out­ side, but they'd missed the uncluttered spirit of the original within. Too trendy and Euro, without enough British reticence.

Still, I thought, if you really like driving a car, you can always look out the window...

Also, there may have been an intentional message in that interior design. It said, "We know this car is supposed to be British, but you can tell by looking around you that modern Germans have been in­volved, with all the obsessive attention to detail that implies." Or, put more simply, "These people own micrometers!"

Mike, having accomplished his mission­ary visit, said goodbye and headed for Illinois to visit his mother for a few days, then cruised back home to Colorado.

A few weeks later, I got a call from Tom Harrer, an old racing buddy who used to drive a TR-4 and an S2000 in the SCCA. He told me he and his wife Anne were picking up their new green Mini in Milwaukee and would be coming through the Madison area. So we invited them to din­ner, and Barb and I got to take a drive in their standard, non-supercharged Mini.

Nice car, and in some ways I liked it bet­ter than the S model, just because you have to work it a little harder to go fast. Simpler styling, too, more like the old Mini.

So we'd finally had a drive in both itera­tions of the new Mini, thanks to generous visitors, but this was not the first time a friend had attempted to spread the gospel.

Only a few months earlier, our friend Richie Mayer, had called us from Sedona, Arizona. Richie is a songwriter and music producer who restores old Alfas, vintage races a Porsche 914-6, rides a Moto Guzzi and has a small collection of vintage elec­tric and acoustic guitars. Another perfect being, in other words, disguised as a citi­zen ofEarth.

We mean no harm, but are awaiting instructions.

Anyway, Richie called and said, "Guess what? I've just won a chance to buy the first Mini Cooper S at the dealership in Phoenix."

"You won a chance to buy a car?"

"Yes. The dealership had a poem-writing contest about the new Mini, so I wrote a song about it and made a CD. The song is called, "I Kiss My Mini." I won the contest, so now I have a yellow Cooper S on the way."

Nothing like having a full recording stu­dio in your house to overwhelm the best poetic efforts of some fourth grader with a crayon and a school penmanship tablet with Frodo on the cover.

A few weeks later, Richie called back to say he'd taken delivery of the Mini. "This thing really is fun," he said. "You've got to drive it."

I finally drove Richie's car last month. While hauling our dirt bikes to Baja, my buddy Pat Donnelly and I stopped at Se­dona and went driving all over the beauti­ful Red Rocks area in the yellow Cooper S.

Richie likes the car so much, it seems to have temporarily nullified his usual passion for buying and restoring hopelessly shot old Alfas.

Off we went for a short drive into the country, while Mike waited on our porch swing with a beer and our three confused dogs, who appeared to be wondering if we'd traded our home and dogs for a new Mini.

"I'm looking at an old Alfa GTV" he told me, "but I don't know why I would drive it instead of the Mini. The Mini has so many things going for it; it's neat-looking, fun to drive and you can go anywhere without having to work on it. And it's new!"

I frowned hard and tried to grasp the possibility that those four attributes could all exist simultaneously in the same car.

Then, by way of anecdotal overkill, I ran into my friend Bill Neale— automotive artist, motorcycle aficionado, Texas gentle­ man and Cobra driver—at the Amelia Is­ land Concours this year. He told me he'd bought a Cooper S and liked it so much he'd taken it on the Texas Hill Country Ral­ly, instead of driving his Cobra.

Yesterday, I got a letter from my old pal Doug Harper, who is a sociology professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. An­ other guitar player/car buff of impeccable credentials and subtle judgment, even if he has just only started riding motorcycles due to some delayed learning problem.

Doug informs me that, after much sleep­lessness and soul-searching, he's trading his beloved Miata in on a new Cooper S.

So the pressure mounts.

I haven't quite decided yet if the new Mini is exactly the car for me and my countrified needs in the people-and-stuff- hauling department, but it's awfully nice to see people who love cars— and understand the mechanical essence of things— finding satisfaction and a spirit o f affordable fun in something new.

It seems to me this happens only every five or 10 years. The Mazda Miata had that capacity to reawaken car enthusiasm among the faithful, and so did the Porsche Boxster in recent times. And now the Mini, which, I believe, passes the single most stringent test of good design: When you spot one on the highway, you are helpless not to point it out to others.

Your right arm levitates of its own voli­tion and points at the passing car like a magnetized compass needle, and your voice automatically says, "Look, there goes a Mini!"

Forty-four years after their introduction, the old ones still do this too. It never fails.

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