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Fairfield, New York, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to Bert Hoff for the hookup!
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When BMW brought Mini back in the early 2000s, the taillights on Frank Stephenson’s original design were triangular. They later filled out and got a bit more squarish, and have remained so for about a decade — but that looks to change starting next year. The upper and lower inner chunks of the clusters have been chipped away, making sideways trapezoids.
The entire unit has been subdivided into what I could only describe as pixels, but like pixels from an old-school LCD display. If I squint, it seems like the bars that would comprise the Union Jack are a bit lighter than the rest, and I bet those light up in similar fashion as the current Mini’s taillights.
This would be a very smart move for Mini, because it’s getting so much attention over the flag lights from nerds like us. I’m willing to bet every person that directly follows a new Mini has noticed the design, and so long as they’ve ever seen 15 seconds of Austin Powers, they probably get the joke.
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I have less to say about the rest of the upcoming Mini’s look. I mean, I’m still reminded of goatees or that one episode of The Powerpuff Girls when I study the front, and the headlights have these crossbars on their upper and lower portions that almost look like eyelids on a Family Guy character. I’m overflowing with cartoon character references.
There’s more to say about the interior, where Mini designers have seemingly ditched the small pill-shaped digital instrument cluster behind the steering wheel in favor of a heads-up display. The dash is entirely clad in what looks to be canvas, with a big old circular panel affixed to the center dash. It’s like the essence of a Mini interior stripped down to its most iconographic parts, and it’s kind of soulless. I don’t love it coming from the current Mini’s fun and lighthearted cabin.
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Supposedly this new Mini Cooper will be available in internal combustion and battery electric forms. If the manufacturer can squeeze roughly 50 more miles out of the SE while keeping the price around where it sits today — and the driving dynamics on point — it’ll be a pretty compelling bargain EV.
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The simplicity of the slant six engine design, its relatively modest output, and the quality of the main rotating parts (including a forged crankshaft) as well as the effective cooling and lubrication systems, meant these engines lasted forever. Find any “most reliable engines of all time” list on the internet, and the Chrysler slant six will be on it.
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This is why I bought my 1965 Plymouth Valiant. I want a winter car to replace my Lexus LX470, which is a swell car, but worth too much for me to let rust out on Michigan’s salty roads, and a bit boring and thirsty, with its four-speed slushbox and ridiculous curb weight. I want something fun to drive in the winter, and few things are as fun as a three-speed column-shift manual transmission.
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I spotted the car on upstate New York’s Facebook Marketplace with an asking price of $2,835. Andrew and his wife Sydney drove me over an hour to a Christian bible camp, where the man who runs the place showed me his wasp-infested Valiant, which he swore had only 51,500 original miles (this, I later learned when going through the service records, was false; the notes clearly show the vehicle eclipsing 100,000 miles).
The man was nice (to me, not the wasps; he murdered them viciously — odd behavior for someone who runs a bible camp, but also maybe not), but didn’t know much about his car. He’d only owned it for a few years, and couldn’t tell me whether first gear is synchronized (it is not). Is it a bit alarming that he didn’t know the answer to that? Yes, a bit. I’ll change the transmission fluid as soon as I can to drain out chunks of those first gear teeth.
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The test drive went well; motor fired up quickly, and the transmission was quiet. I handed the seller $2,000, he signed his registration, and I was off. Well, after filling the motor with a quart of oil, the radiator with nearly a gallon of coolant, and the single brake fluid reservoir with a splash of DOT 3.
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Following Andrew’s Mitsubishi Montero, I drove the Valiant 60 miles from the bible camp to my friend’s house, and fell head-over-heels in love. The three-speed column-shift transmission is sublime; it’s fun to shift, and goes into all three gears (plus reverse) smoothly. The smooth-revving slant-six is just incredible, offering plenty of torque, and never stuttering under acceleration. Sure, there’s some vibration under acceleration; neither the fuel gauge nor the coolant temperature gauge works; and there’s plenty of rust on the floorboards, doors, and quarter panels (the main unibody rails are solid); but I don’t care. This regular old 1960s Plymouth sedan — with its blue interior filled with two three-person bench seats — has my heart.
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Well, for now, that is. This machine still has to get me 650 miles from upstate New York to Michigan; only then will I know whether it deserves the title of “Most reliable American car ever.”
What you see here is Bentley’s newest race car, the Continental GT3 Pikes Peak, built explicitly to attack the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb this June. This is the third time in as many years that Bentley has launched a factory effort at PPIHC, following a production car record in a Continental GT in 2019 and a production SUV record set by a Bentayga. This time Bentley is aiming for the Time Attack 1 record, a lofty goal, with mountain regular Rhys Millen at the wheel — Millen also drove in ’18 and ’19. There’s only one problem: this isn’t a GT3.
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Cup Grand Touring Cars, colloquially known as GT3, is a set of regulations developed by SRO and maintained by the FIA for grand touring racing cars. Street cars are strictly homologated to the class with limits on horsepower, minimum weight, and aerodynamics. In order to run in the class, Bentley has to build all of its Continental GT3 racers to the same specification and it will receive adjustments to its performance relative to other cars in the class with series-mandated ballast or engine air intake restrictors.
While Bentley specifically calls its Pikes Peak machine a “GT3” it has been modified above and beyond the spec of the class so that it simply cannot be GT3 any longer. While it may have started as a car intended for GT3 homologation, it has been prepared and bastardized beyond the scope of that name. With a huge rear wing, the deepest diffuser I’ve ever seen, and a massive dual-plane front splitter flanked by gargantuan canards, it’s already beyond GT3, but then Bentley tuned the 4-liter twin-turbocharged engine to produce well more than the GT3 class allows. Come on, Stowe. Get your shit together.
Bentley’s Member of the Board for Engineering, Dr Matthias Rabe, comments:
“We are delighted to be returning to Pikes Peak for a third time – now powered by renewable fuel, as the launch project for another new element of our Beyond100 programme. Our powertrain engineers are already researching both biofuels and e-fuels for use by our customers alongside our electrification programme – with intermediate steps of adopting renewable fuels at the factory in Crewe and for our company fleet. In the meantime, the Continental GT3 Pikes Peak will show that renewable fuels can allow motorsport to continue in a responsible way, and hopefully it will capture the third and final record in our triple crown.”
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Pikes Peak doesn’t subscribe to any particular sanctioning body’s ruleset, preferring a run-what-you-brung approach, which is refreshing in today’s motorsport. I’m not knocking Bentley for building this truly badass Continental, but I do take umbrage with the use of GT3 in the name. I’m a stickler for things doing what they say on the tin.
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To me, this car feels like the ultimate extension of a production-based machine. It’s kind of the GT version of what Porsche did with the 919 Hybrid Evo a few years ago. It took a car built to a very strict specification (in Porsche’s case the FIA’s LMP1 category) and removed the restrictive power and aero rules to see what it was capable of at full chat. If this had been called the Continental Evolution or some such thing, I wouldn’t even be writing this blog.
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We’ve known that an electric Mini JCW hot hatchback is in the works from the Brit brand by BMW. It’s an exciting proposition, one many of us are looking forward to, and it gets more exciting as the day draws nearer. In a tweet on Wednesday, Mini released the above teaser image with the caption “Feels like it’s time for a boost. Watch this space… #ElectricThrillMaximised” Does that mean Mini will be pacing the field at future Formula E events?
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The current Formula E safety car is this unique roofless BMW i8 with a giant wing. The hybrid i8 sports car has been serving in this role since season 1 way back in 2014 when the i8 was a brand new car. It makes sense that the company would want to replace the aging i8 as the face of safety in one of the most advanced and forward-looking series in the world of motorsport. Not least because the i8 will be ending production soon, but also because BMW will be leaving Formula E at the end of this season.
With BMW out, and Mini’s commitment to electrification, this swap would make perfect sense. You can see from the light bar on the roof of the Mini that it matches the one currently in use on the BMW. Therefore, one could infer that this is the specification which will continue onward into Mini’s tenure as safety car.
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I have high hopes for the electric JCW. The Mini Cooper SE electric is already considered one of the best handling electric cars on the market, so by extension the better handling JCW version should deliver more power and more on-track speed. Because Formula E tracks are typically quite tight, the Mini should be able to deliver on the job of safety car. Electric torque and nimble handling should be enough tools in the box for the effort.
Dammit, I’m going to have to buy one of these things, aren’t I?
With Mini almost sure to be running the Formula E safety car in the near future, how long will it be before Mini enters the sport as a manufacturer? While it’s certain that BMW is leaving FE, there’s nothing saying its compact car brand can’t pick up where it left off. It wouldn’t be the first time in this series, either, as Nissan’s FE program came out of Renault’s abandoning the sport.
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I, for one, would love to see Mini racing in Formula E.
The Jimny is one of the coolest off-roaders bar none, but did you know that there’s room for improvement even for the Jimny? This is what peak performance looks like, and its name is the Maruti Suzuki Gypsy.
The Jimny already rocks, and I’m bracing myself for my first sighting of the Mexican market Jimnys. But I’ll confess that I arrived to the Jimny by way of the Samurai and its overseas cousin, the Maruti Gypsy. Sold in India, I first fell in love with the Gypsy from the only secret agent that gives James Bond a run for his money, Jason Bourne:
The Gypsy in this The Bourne Supremacy scene is a Gypsy King which is really just a Jimny with a longer wheelbase and a taller roofline. Bourne’s off-roader sports a hardtop but the Gypsy was available with a soft top and it even came with rear bench seats!
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You could almost call it a Defender knock off but in this case, it would only be a compliment because the Gypsy King ends up being as cool as any Rover.
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It was nigh unstoppable off road but kind of sucked on the road. That sounds like the modern Jimny, except the modern version has some creature comforts while the Gypsy and Gypsy King had nothing in the way of amenities. Though, if you ask me, that’s a plus for a truck like this.
The platform the Gypsy is built on, the SJ410, was available with a long-wheelbase and a pop-top (plus a slew of other combinations) globally, according to Suzuki Club UK and Motor Trend. But the Maruti trucks were exclusively LWBs and either soft or pop tops. I think it may be because this was a military and first aid vehicle, so standardizing production would save money. Also, they were the only ones in the family with bench seats. I suspect the benches are why the Marutis came with the LWB, to maximize passenger capacity.
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It was very successful with Indian law enforcement and the Indian Military and it enjoyed quite a run in Indian motorsport. Of course, those trucks running in rally events had upgraded drivetrains because the stock motor started at a modest four-cylinder 1.0 liter which did not exceed 80 or so horsepower and 76 lb-ft of torque, even in its last iterations.
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The Gypsy sold in its home market for over three decades, from 1985 – 2019, per Autocar India, but it could be set for a return! There are reports of the Jimny being reintroduced into the Indian market — maybe even as a Gypsy — and I think it was only a matter of time given its popularity.
And also because the Jimny is currently produced in India. Maruti Suzuki may not have a hard time selling it in its country of origin and the carmaker is considering its viability, per Autocar India. I really hope there’s a new one with the long wheelbase and tall roof.
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Of course, I should mention that the Gypsy has a nameplate that may be offensive to people of Romani heritage, so if Maruti does revive the iconic off roader it might be time to give it a new badge. But, hey, Jimny King has got a nice ring to it.
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