Photo: SB Medien
It’s quite funny to see a grown man wearing a huge helmet, stuck behind a small steering wheel on the Nurburgring. Apparently, the guys from BMW/MINI didn’t pick their testers all that well and one of them could hardly fit inside the new Cooper Convertible while testing its handling on the Green Hell. At least that’s how it looks like in our spy photos.
The Mk3 model was just spotted on the famous German track, wearing the usual camouflage and eating up tires like there was no tomorrow. Fortunately, our spy photographers were there to catch up with them.
The car is definitely a Cooper S model, judging solely by the front fascia and the bonnet. The bumper features those all-familiar air intakes at the bottom and there’s a hood scoop right above the grille that sports a camouflaged ’S’.
That means we’re looking at a MINI running the 2-liter 4-cylinder B48 turbocharged petrol engine that’s making 184 HP and 280 Nm (300 with overboost) of torque, a ‘heart’ that we had the chance to test ourselves earlier this year.
However, unlike our test car, this one has a retractable roof. It’s a soft top, just like all others before it and it looks like it has the same mechanism as on the Mk2 model (at least they look the same).
A launch date for this model hasn’t been announced yet and BMW didn’t even mention the new model but we’re guessing we’re not too far off. Furthermore, if we were to make an assumption, we’d probably say that we’re not more than a couple of months away.
As for the specs, well, the drop top version should be a little slower than the Hardtop. That means that the 0-100 km/h (62 mph) will take a bit longer than 6.8 seconds, probably around 7. Compared to the current model, that would be a 0.3-second improvement.
Prices should also be similar to the outgoing model. If the Hatch serves as an example, the prices could go down in some markets while others will notice a slight increase but no bigger than $500.
The car is definitely a Cooper S model, judging solely by the front fascia and the bonnet. The bumper features those all-familiar air intakes at the bottom and there’s a hood scoop right above the grille that sports a camouflaged ’S’.
That means we’re looking at a MINI running the 2-liter 4-cylinder B48 turbocharged petrol engine that’s making 184 HP and 280 Nm (300 with overboost) of torque, a ‘heart’ that we had the chance to test ourselves earlier this year.
However, unlike our test car, this one has a retractable roof. It’s a soft top, just like all others before it and it looks like it has the same mechanism as on the Mk2 model (at least they look the same).
A launch date for this model hasn’t been announced yet and BMW didn’t even mention the new model but we’re guessing we’re not too far off. Furthermore, if we were to make an assumption, we’d probably say that we’re not more than a couple of months away.
As for the specs, well, the drop top version should be a little slower than the Hardtop. That means that the 0-100 km/h (62 mph) will take a bit longer than 6.8 seconds, probably around 7. Compared to the current model, that would be a 0.3-second improvement.
Prices should also be similar to the outgoing model. If the Hatch serves as an example, the prices could go down in some markets while others will notice a slight increase but no bigger than $500.
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