Pete Foglia and his tuning shop MIN Speed (formerly MyMINI) are featured in this week’s issue of Autoweek. Pete (for years one of our favorite people in the MINI world) talks mods, how the shop got started, and one of his latest project cars. Here’s an excerpt:

>Peter Foglia guessed, and he guessed wrong. He figured that his South Florida Mini-only store, Minspeed, would sell a lot of aftermarket parts to owners of regular Coopers, because, after all, by not buying the pricier Cooper S, they’d have more to spend on personalizing their cars.

>”My mistake,” Foglia says. “It’s the Cooper S owners who come in and say, ‘I just bought this car. What do you have for me?’ ”

>What Foglia has is a long list of upgrades-inside, outside, under the hood-for owners of the 2002-2006 R50-R53 models, but aftermarket parts for the new ’07 model, called the R56, are trickling in slowly. The last-generation Cooper S, with its 1.6-liter, 168-hp, supercharged engine, is already a potent little car, but it’s one with untapped potential.

[ MinSpeed Mini Cooper S ] Autoweek