The MINI Aero Kit: First Official Photos

A comprehensive redesign is the best alternative. And I don’t simply mean the body kit, I mean the entire vehicle … OR simply bring back the old design with its superlative hood/fender contours and deploy a frekkin’ airbag from under the bumper to “safeguard ped safety.” Similarly, bring back the beautiful curved glass C-pillars and much better scaled and more attractive tail lights that appeared to be molded into the body. Of course this may not be viable but at least it underscores some of the best features that have been allegedly foresaken for “safety sake.”

The fat fender lips will likely be reduced by an enterprising after-marketer handy with a lipo syringe although pouty Angelina lips are hot right now! How ’bout offering an inflatible options package that would enable remote inflation of not only the lips but also the grill frame. This would differentiate the expressions of aroused female MINIs from the now wanna-be “agressive” looking masculine bulldog MINIs. (:

Stop this please! It is a joke, no? MINI design team cannot have done this…it is too amateur! No, even much more worse! Please MINI/BMW, bring back Frank Stephenson and pay him whatever he asks, your future is on the edge like in The Italian Job, first edition…

In my opinion, all it shows is how lost Frank Stephenson’s design language is on whoever is weilding the pen at MINI lately. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the majority of the design elements on the R56 are not in my view evolutions of what Frank did with the R50/53, but rather a derivative set of changes for change’s sake. “It was an oval here before, let’s keep it an oval and just extend it back. We had a big speedo before, let’s make it bigger…” and so forth.

Gabe, I couldn’t agree more with you about the necessity of the wheel arches and the way the trim wraps around the bottom perimeter of the car – such a key to the look of the MINI. Here they’re set off so much, they become the instant focus of the whole look of the car – which is simply horrid. It redirects the visual focus away from any sort of unified aggressive look to “hey look at these black wheel arches!”

Awful. Awful. Awful. It seriously looks like it ought to be offered on an eBay auction in Asia for $39.95 USD! The JCW looks fantastic. How did they screw this up?

MAN! That’s screwed up body kit!!! General R56 design critiques aside… as a “finished” aero product goes… someone should be embarrased (and fired) over this one.

If you’re going to go with painted bumper covers and side sills (and color matched fenders are out), for god sakes… DON’T have them interrupt/abreviate the fenders arches. If the fake brake ducts have to intesect, do something to tie them in like drillsliger showed… or set them apart like this:

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b330/msh441/MINI2.jpg

The photoshop is fantastic – might have to forward it to my boss Lol

I got a call last week that my order was going in at April Production with the hyper sport package. I spent this morning calling the dealer trying to remove this package. Hopefully they can still do it. Arg…..

Unsuccessful solution. I agree with several posts above, that painting black arches in body color will defiantly help.

In all the years of religiously reading Motoringfile, I have never seen this much hate for something coming out of Oxford. This is unprecidented.

I hope you’re listening, MINI!