The maxi-Mini dresses up
Even a niche fashion-led brand like Mini must have a practical crossover vehicle in its lineup these days. Paul Owen samples the Countryman in its frilliest form – the new Rockfield Edition.
I DON’T think that this Mini Cooper S Countryman Rockfield Edition is quite what Sir Alec Issignonis had in mind when he first conceived the idea of a cheap miniature car and kick-started the whole Mini phenomenon back in 1959.
For starters, the model nomenclature almost consumes an entire sentence, presenting you poor readers with a descriptive overload. And the anti-minimalism sentiments of the Mini Cooper S Countryman Rockfield Edition don’t stop at the name.
It weighs roughly double what Sir Alec’s original Mini did at 1400kg, you could buy a halfdecent SUV for the $59,900 asking price, and it looks bloated despite the designers trying to trick the eye otherwise with things like the blacked-out wheel arches. But, boy-oh-boy, is it fun to drive.
Not quite as much fun as an ordinary Cooper S, mind, but you still get some impression that this car is the current Dakar Rally champion from the wheel.
It darts and dives where other crossover wagons lumber and labour, and the perky Cooper S powertrain easily shrugs off the burden of the heavier Countryman body.
You can specify the Mini Cooper S Countryman Rockfield Edition in either three-pedal and two-pedal driving formats for the same money, and I’d recommend the former for the way it enables a more intimate relationship with the vehicle’s sporty personality.
It would also add a welcome dose of minimalism to the maxiMini, and help it maintain its individuality in a crossover segment populated almost entirely by automatics.
For the opportunity to stand apart from the driving masses has always been the main attraction for investing in one of BMW’s versions of a Mini.
The German-influenced range has eschewed the downsizing and downgrading that made the Issignonis-designed original so affordable and frugal-to-own from the time it first emerged in 2003, opting instead to become a hopefully more fashionable and more personalised alternative to an Audi A3.
Practicality and pragmatism took a back seat to style and frills, and while the weight of BMW’s three-door Minis blew out in the interests of attaining high crash test scores, the heavier construction still denied a spacious back seat and decent luggage capacity to buyers.
This limited the ability of the range to retain its youthful buyers once they’d started to have families. The solution was to introduce the much more spacious five-door Countryman back in 2010, arguably a car that should have been part of the BMW-led Mini revival from the beginning.
The fact that the Countryman is the most sensible version of a 21st Century Mini must have seemed a little incongruous to BMW, because the Rockfield Edition is an attempt to balance the inherent left-brain appeal of the model with increased right-brain frivolity.
The name, I assume, is a reference to the famous Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, where Queen recorded Bohemian Rhapsody, and the special edition Countryman adds layers of equipment in the same way as the band added vocal tracks to the song.
There’s evidently roughly $17,000’s worth of stuff added to the RE in exchange for a $8400 premium above the ordinary Countryman. You get a John Cooper Works body-kit, blackedout 18’’ alloy wheels, a Harmon Kardon audio upgrade, bi-xenon headlights, satnav, Mini’s first fully-functioned trip computer, an interior lighting package, plenty of carbon-fibre bling, and a long list of other baubles.
Of these, only the sportier wheel/tyre package and revised suspension tuning have any dynamic effect, but they do try to replicate the go-kart-like handling of a three-door Mini in the Countryman.
It’s a valiant attempt that comes close to succeeding, but the higher-riding body dictated by the Countryman’s crossover design parameters means that understeer is ultimately more easily found than when driving the more compact, lower-riding version of a Cooper S.
Meanwhile the plush ride expected of a Countryman has been corrupted to some degree by the RE’s beefed-up spring rates and increased stabiliser bar stiffness.
None of this matters when you point the Mini Cooper S Countryman Rockfield Edition down an inviting piece of sinuous road, and let the 1.4-litre turbocharged direct-injection engine haul the car out of corners with its prodigious torque.
By crossover standards, this is the driver’s vehicle of the sub$60,000 class, and it is only eclipsed in terms of sportiness by freakish new crossover vehicles like Audi’s $104,900 RSQ3 and Merc’s $99,900 GLA45 AMG .
So if you have a family to haul and have to have a Mini, but wish to retain at least 90 per cent of the sporty driving experience of a three-door Cooper S, then the Rockfield Edition of the Countryman definitely fits the bill. Just don’t expect the ghost of Sir Alec to approve of the purchase, OK?