Photo: S. Baldauf/SB-Medien
Most drivers testing camouflage-wearing pre-production cars get really pissed when they see people pointing their cameras at them. There’s no official explanation for it, but we’re guessing it’s the same as with celebrities and paparazzi: nobody likes to have a camera lens facing their way all the time. Except maybe the attention freaks, who knows?
Imagine, then, the double-rage this MINI driver must have felt when our spy photographer caught him spinning his car right in the first corner of a new Nurburgring lap. We can see the car entering the left-hand turn pretty aggressively. Even though it’s just a burst of still images, you can tell it all happened very quickly, with the rear of the car becoming loose and the car spinning out of control.
According to our photographer, the MINI was wearing new tires and the outside temperature was very low, which would explain how a kart-like front-wheel-driven car such as the MINI managed to oversteer so violently. What it doesn’t explain is the crystal-clear quality of the pictures, so we’re guessing our man with the camera was wearing warm clothes. And possibly fluffy mittens.
The cold track - cold tires combination is a dangerous one, especially when you’ve just lapped the circuit a few times on warm tires and are used to the car behaving a certain way. You must hit an imaginary reset button when swapping tires, or risk something like this near-crash that could have ended a lot worse.
The last two shots of the batch of twelve images show that the driver didn’t waste any time getting back on the track, and we’re willing to bet he was a lot more careful for the remainder of the testing session after that scare.
As for the MINI Cabrio JCW, there isn’t much to be said. Here’s our review of the standard JCW: read it outdoors, and you can imagine it’s the Cabrio.
According to our photographer, the MINI was wearing new tires and the outside temperature was very low, which would explain how a kart-like front-wheel-driven car such as the MINI managed to oversteer so violently. What it doesn’t explain is the crystal-clear quality of the pictures, so we’re guessing our man with the camera was wearing warm clothes. And possibly fluffy mittens.
The cold track - cold tires combination is a dangerous one, especially when you’ve just lapped the circuit a few times on warm tires and are used to the car behaving a certain way. You must hit an imaginary reset button when swapping tires, or risk something like this near-crash that could have ended a lot worse.
The last two shots of the batch of twelve images show that the driver didn’t waste any time getting back on the track, and we’re willing to bet he was a lot more careful for the remainder of the testing session after that scare.
As for the MINI Cabrio JCW, there isn’t much to be said. Here’s our review of the standard JCW: read it outdoors, and you can imagine it’s the Cabrio.
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