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Autocar staff
http://www.autocar.co.uk
08/18/2008 - 04:35 PM
London, UK
One of these cars is a souped-up special that has become compromised in its search for speed; the other is a pared-down athlete for whom fleet performance comes naturally and without apparent effort. (Autocar photo) » More Photos
You may well look at the sight of a pure-bred sports car being compared with a mass-produced front-drive hatchback and wonder if you’re seeing straight. After all, what light can a niche specialist such as the Lotus Elise S possibly shed upon the new Mini John Cooper Works, an all-purpose whiz-kid with a price tag thousands of dollars lower? More than a little.
Needless to say, we think their sharing of space here is fair game. It is very tempting to pigeonhole every new car into a category shared by similar designs – to whit, you’d compare the Mini with a Honda Civic Type R or similar. But the public rarely thinks along such straight lines, especially when the cars being considered are largely recreational in nature. Many will have a budget and a chief requirement to simply have as much fun as that figure allows. Factors such as style, space, image and practicality will make significant, maybe even deciding, contributions, but if you’re looking at cars such as this Mini JCW or Lotus Elise S for any other reason than for motoring pleasure, you’re in the wrong shop.
So here we have a front-drive turbocharged tin-top hatch costing $30,000 versus a rear-drive, mid-engined, normally aspirated roadster for which Lotus asks $46,000. Few will buy the Mini in its rather under-equipped base spec, though, and it doesn’t take long on the online configurator to nudge its price up to Elise money.
We are used to car manufacturers arriving on common ground from dramatically different directions, but it still seems odd to park the Lotus and Mini next to each other and consider them as true rivals.
Mini is undeniably rapid, but it's hard to find a balance between understeer and lift-off oversteer. (Autocar photo) » More Photos
Mini has taken a base product and, by addition and upgrade, transformed it into what it hopes is a fun and furious road weapon. The Lotus, by contrast, is the base product almost by definition and the living embodiment of Colin Chapman’s “less is more” approach. It looks tiny next to the Mini
If we turn our attention first to the Mini, it’s soon apparent where the money needed to upgrade from a standard Cooper S has been spent. There are visual enhancements, including a more aggressive front spoiler, a new rear valance, a fresh set of 17in. alloys and some unbelievably cheap-looking badges. Inside, the speedo reads to 160mph (not an affectation; it’s needed), there are some shiny new kickplates, a leather-rimmed wheel and standard air-con.
More impressive is the inclusion of exactly the same 208hp 1.6-liter turbo motor from the Mini Challenge racing car, complete with some big-bore exhausts. The brakes have been enlarged, an electronic differential has been fitted that mimics the effect of a limited-slip item, and even the six-speed gearbox has been strengthened. A proper, comprehensive tuning job, then, and no less than we’d expect, given who’s pulling the strings: BMW.
Superbly balanced Lotus is only slightly quicker than the Mini on the racetrack, but it's muchh more fun to drive. (Autocar photo) » More Photos
The Lotus, with its 134hp 1.8-liter Toyota motor and five-speed ’box, looks positively anemic by comparison. But the joy of lightweight design is that it is self-perpetuating; the lighter your chassis and body, the correspondingly lighter your suspension, brakes, wheels and tires can be, all of which minimize the influence of weight’s nasty little sidekick, unsprung mass. So while the Elise’s power and torque figures come nowhere close to those of the Mini, its more telling power and torque-to-weight numbers are in the same ballpark.
Still, it is the Mini that feels quicker in a straight line. Ignore the Lotus’s advantage in the 0-60mph sprint (5.8sec compared with 6.4sec for the Mini); that says everything about the traction advantage of its mid-engined, rear-drive configuration and nothing about its real straight-line speed.
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