MINI sources insist the slow-selling twins will be replaced by a machine that looks like a stand-alone sports car, even as it shares the next MINI’s front-drive architecture.
To be built in both hard- and soft-top versions, the planned sports car will share virtually no body panels with the rest of the MINI range, even as it retains key styling cues like the round headlights.
MINI initially plans to offer the new sports models, which are said to carry the code names F58 (hard top) and F59 (soft top), in Cooper S and JCW form and they should be on sale by late 2015 or early 2016.
Where the core engine layout for the balance of the MINI range will be downsized to either petrol- or diesel-powered 1.5-litre, turbo-charged, three-cylinder, engines, the F58 and F59 sports cars will use four-cylinder power. Don’t expect that four-cylinder engine to be a carry-over of the current 1.6-litre four, though. Instead, both the Cooper S and the JCW models of all future MINI models will use two different versions of the TwinPower direct-injection, turbo-charged 2.0-litre four-cylinder engine.
While BMW and MINI have been tight-lipped on the change, it is almost certain to mean the end of MINI engine production at England’s historic Hams Hall plant in favour of either German production for engines it will share with the BMW 1-, 2- and 3-Series or lower-cost production outside the European Union, possibly in India or Malaysia.
The rest of the new sports car’s layout will be mechanically similar to the upcoming MINI hatch, running on the same chassis architecture and carrying similar suspension layouts, similar steering hardware, similar transmissions, even as it uses a sleeker, lower nose and a more curvaceous profile.
“If we are only going to sell 15,000 a year of a certain model, we should make more of an effort to make it stand out, to make it jump off the road as something different but still identifiably a MINI,” a source said.
Besides being a sleeker, sportier shape, the new sports car is said to take some of its futuristic interior materials from last week’s MINI Vision concept car, while it could also benefit from the mass-production carbon-fibre technology introduced with BMW’s i3 electric car.
While excitement about the new sports model is said to be palpable inside MINI’s design department, its production debut will still have to wait in line until more critical models have been rolled out.
