There is nothing glorious about doing damage to your car. And there’s definitely no glory in doing it to someone else’s. Cue the crunching sound of ice breaking plastic. That was the sound I heard as I was parallel parking a few days after particular bad 24″ Chicago blizzard this winter. As anyone will tell you navigating the unplowed side streets of Chicago are bad enough. But trying to parallel park in them is even worse. Alas that was my mission and unfortunately I missed accounting for a rather large glacial like piece of icy snow. I rolled over it with my back and onto it with my right plastic side skirt. And that side skirt did exactly what its engineers have designed it to do. It broke.
Ah, but the plastic skirt itself didn’t break. It bent. What broke was three of the 20 cent fasteners that held the side skirt in place.
For years I’ve heard people complain about the black plastic cladding on modern MINIs. However we’ve always held that it’s actually a brilliant bit of design coming all the way from the Frank Stephenson days. For starters it emphasizes the wheel/tire within the overall ratio of the car making it look more sporty and aggressive. This is particularly helpful given the modern MINI’s high belt-line. It’s why MINIs with painted sills and plastic fenders look a bit dowdy unless they’re sporting 18″ wheels. Or as we’ve called the look, Tom Selleck without a mustache.
Secondly it visually increases the wheels at the corner look that is so important within MINI’s design language.
Finally it allows for bumps an bruises often associated with the type of city driving most MINIs do, to be easily and cheaply fixed.
To that point the total bill for the parts associated with our little excursion? 63 cents.
<p>I have a set of vintage R50 “Gabe Bridger” edition side skirts sitting in my garage waiting to become collectors items 😉
(or replacements for mine if I break the ones I have)</p>
<p>Don’t forget rocks flying off the tires won’t chip the fender paint… since the fenders are plastic. I agree – painted fenders on a 1st/2nd/3rd gen MINI just looks weird.</p>
<p>Of course those $0.30 parts will cost $2 each at the dealership!!</p>
<p>“Tom Selleck without a mustache” #nailedit</p>
<p>By all means paint your arches; just use something other than body colour to keep that aggressive look that emphasizes the corners. They manage to make even my skimpy winter tires look aggressive (+42mm offset doesn’t hurt either)…</p>
<p>That is a nice wheel arch treatment!</p>
<p>I’d have to respectably disagree. Everyone has their own personal taste, but to me that is 10 times worse than a body colored arch, which are slightly worse than the plastic arches. In this case I don’t think you can do better than the textured plastic bits.</p>
<p>I used to agree that the black plastic arches looked better than painted body color, until I got a great deal on my Blackband JCW Aerokit. I wouldn’t say that all MINIs with all bumper and wheel configurations look better painted (still think black plastic looks better on most), but on mine, I’m quite happy with how it turned out.</p>
<p>Very sharp! Actually, I like both looks evenly but painted arches on a dark color look especially nice. With my solid Pepper White JCW, the black arches give a little extra contrast. To each, his own I say. Now, if I can just convince ECS Tuning to start making some nice carbon fiber, extended wheel arches for R56s…</p>
<p>…like this</p>