Car Magazine has the scoop on the 2009 edition of the Goodwood Revival this September. As you might expect the Mini/MINI brand will be featured prominently. Heres an except:
Mini turned 50 recently, and the celebration of its engineering achievements continues at the Goodwood Revival in September 2009. Huge numbers of pre-1966 Minis are expected on track, bringing their owners and large numbers of enthusiasts with them.
So what are the Mini highlights at Goodwood? Champions and role models such as five-time winner of Le Mans Derek Bell will be racing, as well as Jackie Oliver, Bobby Rahal, Anthony Reid and Brian Redman. You can also hope to see ‘The Rally Professor,’ Rauno Aaltonen, who won the Gallaher 500 touring car races in a Mini Cooper S. continued →
We’ve been wanting to get our hands on a Mini Do More trailer hitch for years but never had the right opportunity. Luckily we found someone who had not only bought and use the hitch. But also towed pretty much everything you could think of.. including a plane. Enjoy:
I ordered my Clubman (on January 24, 2008) with the “factory tow package” and was disappointed to find it deleted when I took delivery on 2/29/08. I was further disappointed when Mini of Peabody (MA) told me they wouldn’t install an after-market hitch (giving me some vague story that it wasn’t crash-tested with a tow hitch).
So I spent next 12 months on the waiting lists of MiniFini and Mini Do More while they perfected their Clubman hitches. Finally in January ’09, I ordered and installed Mini Do More’s Trailer Receiver Hitch & Tow Wiring Harness. continued →
As we’ve reported MINI is releasing several variants of a lower-spec MINI One and One D in specific markets for 2010. Meant to work with either Government scrappage programs or to simply offer the MINI at lower price points and with less CO2 emissions, the cars are the lowest spec models released since the launch of the new brand in 2001. In the case of the models above, they are also meant to combat the lower price points of the subsequent sales success of he Fiat 500 in the Italian market.
The MINI Ray D, Trigger D and Abbey Road D are all exclusive to the Italian market and use mostly off the shelf parts.
I want to purchase a roof rack for my 2005 Mini Cooper. Â Please point me in the
right direction. Â Should I buy Thule, Yakima, or other? Â Which is best/ easiest
to work with?  Which foot  packs, etc do I need?  I want to haul kayaks and
bikes. Â I’m sorry for all the questions but I keep getting different answers
from different websites and distributors. Â Thanks for any help that you can give
me.
We’ve had experience with Yakima and the OEM rack but would like to throw this out o our readers. Let’s hear it MINI owners, sound of below…
Official Release: The MINI brand achieved a slight increase in sales of 0.3% for the first time since September 2008, with 19,281 (prev.yr. 19,224) deliveries worldwide in July. The new MINI Convertible (3,695 units / +48.5%), which has been available since late March, and the MINI One models (available as Hatch and Clubman, with sales of 3,670 vehicles / + 78.4%) in particular contributed to the gains. In Germany the brand reported its best July sales ever (3,207/ +16.1%), while in its domestic U.K. market (2,819 / +20.7%) and in traditionally high-volume Western European markets such as Italy (1,700 / +20.2%) and France (1,521 / +3.1%), MINI also made major gains in July. For the year to the end of July, 120,813 MINI cars were sold (prev.yr. 146,040 / -17.3%).
As BMW looks at ways to share development costs in the coming years, the idea of sharing the MINI platform has come up again. However this time it’s Peugeot that is the potential partner. Here’s an excerpt from a Financial Times article that broke the news late yesterday:
Norbert Reithofer, BMW’s chief executive, said BMW was talking to Peugeot about a deeper cooperation, but he refused to give any details.
Industry insiders told the Financial Times, however, that the carmaker was in “preliminary talks” about a future shared platform for the Mini model family, which the carmaker aims to expand. continued →
In 2001 BMW debuted the R50 MINI Cooper and MINI One to great acclaim. However tucked away in much of the press coverage of the launch was the fact that BMW didn’t expect to even break even on the development and launch costs over the course of the models life-cycle. The problem were economies of scale and the fact that the MINI was a bespoke platform designed from the ground up to be shared with nothing else on the market (save for the Chrysler developed engine). The writing was on the wall even then. BMW needed multiple variants of the MINI to make the brand stand on its own financially.
Fast forward eight years. MINI has successfully launched it’s second generation hatchback and along the way added a convertible and the long wheel base clubman – all based on the core R56 platform (itself based on the R50). But BMW is just getting started. This fall will see the debut of the R60 crossover (likely named Countryman) that will once again feature a relatively bespoke platform. However, even with the R60 sharing components with the R55/R56, BMW intends to maximize the development costs of the new platform but spinning off several variants. continued →
1st Gen MINI R50: One & MC Hatch R52: All 1st Gen MINI Convt. R53: MCS Hatch 2nd Gen MINI R55: Clubman R56: Hatch R57: Convertible R58: Coupe R59: Roadster R60: MINI Crossover R61: MINI Crossover Coupe 3rd Gen MINI F55: Clubman F56: Hatch F57: Convertible F60: MINI Crossover F62: Traveller
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Sections: 50th Anniversary Aug 11th, 2009 2 Comments 
