You can treat the JCW like an Impreza or Evo, hurling it into corners and mashing the throttle

It’s a Saturday morning and Plant Oxford is deserted. I’m not sure quite what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t the metaphorical big padlock on the gates – there isn’t even anyone in the security booth. I pull up by the blandly titled T Building, next to the main entrance. Not much remains of the original plant, the spiritual home of the Mini, but this giant, windowless brick shed has the jagged triangular roof that so readily identifies it as a survivor from the golden age of British industry.

Despite the very public location, I feel like I’m doing something illicit, like I’ve come here for a subversive rendezvous and I’m going to be spotted any second now. It doesn’t help that I’m nestled behind the wheel of a custard yellow Mini John Cooper Works a month before the car is officially released to the press and public. Then an electric blue JCW rolls round the corner of the T Building and stops nose to nose with me…

Enough of the bad spy story, because there’s an entirely rational explanation for my presence here. The gaudy yellow hot hatch had arrived at Evo Towers two days beforehand – the first one released to any publication worldwide. We weren’t blown away – far from it. In fact puzzled is the best way to describe our collective impressions. Puzzled as to why it didn’t flow down the road as well as the diesel Cooper we’d had in recently. Puzzled about the slackness at the top of the suspension travel. Puzzled as to why the nose was so unsettled. The only logical conclusion? Plant Oxford must have built a duffer.

Luckily BMW had a solution – a replacement car. And here it is, looking, well, much like any other Cooper S to be honest. There are new wheels, but they’re still 17s, with the same width and profile run-flat tyres. Plastic trim that was previously black has been painted body-colour and JCW badges adorn nose, tail and brake calipers (even though Brembo is responsible for the beefier stoppers).

Viewed in the flesh the overall impression is of a meatier Mini, one with a bit more punch, pow and zap. But one that justifies a $ 40,000 price tag, the best part of five grand more than the 172bhp Cooper S? Time to find out.

It’s safe to say the JCW has some impressing to do come Monday. It’s shortly after 5am and the Mini is as crotchety and grouchy as I am, the freer flowing exhaust giving me the full Rice Krispies experience. Half way to the rendezvous we fuel up (40 litres of juice for the Mini, a can of Red Bull for me) and take stock.

The JCW has cruised comfortably so far, there’s no excessive wind noise, the driving position is great, the ride perfectly tolerable over long distances. Pity the cabin is so similar, though. A new gearlever and a badge above the glovebox is about the sum total of the changes. Some new, more supportive seats certainly wouldn’t have gone amiss.

So was the money ploughed into the suspension? Nope. The changes here amount to precisely nothing. Sure, those seeking a more hardcore experience can have sports suspension or the even firmer $ 280 JCW set-up, but that’s not really the point – the JCW is the pinnacle of Mini life, it should offer something different, something exceptional in every area.

It is rapid, though. Genuinely quick, in fact. And it sounds great: raspy engine, farty exhaust. Exactly what you’d hope for from an engine that now breathes better thanks to a larger air-mass sensor, charge line and intake, and expels its gases more easily through a new exhaust manifold and a bigger cat and exhaust. Then there’s the tougher intake valves and seat rings, lower compression ratio, thicker cylinder head and larger twin-scroll turbocharger. Now you can start to see where the money’s been spent.

Two hundred and eight bhp and 206lb ft certainly make themselves felt in a 1205kg Mini. I get to the location ahead of photographer Kenny P, having proved the JCW is an extraordinarily effective overtaking device on the way. It pulls harder than the Cooper S low down, but the real gains are felt above 5000rpm, especially if you select Sport mode, which provides a different engine map, making the engine’s overboost facility more readily available, and also sharpens the throttle and steering. The 1.6-litre four is responsive, fast-acting and fizzy. Open a window and the gentle turbo whistle and soft tsss when you lift off are clearly audible, the insistent exhaust providing accompaniment. It’s the sort of engine that’s simply bloody good fun to use.

But that wasn’t what had us concerned on the roads around the office, it was the chassis, specifically its behaviour under throttle load. This blue car does feel different. It squats less under hard acceleration, the nose doesn’t fall into corners so readily, the steering is more consistent across the rack. Mini subsequently told us they couldn’t find anything wrong with our first car, but this one definitely feels a healthier specimen.

Few roads can unpick a car’s chassis as ably as those around our Wollaston HQ, certainly not the first corner Kenny has chosen: a tight, steep, smooth hairpin. The JCW is dynamite around it, and for one main reason: EDLC, or Electronic Differential Lock Control. It works the same way as a slippy diff, but is managed by electrics rather than mechanics, slowing a wheel if slip is detected and able to apportion up to 100 per cent of torque to either side.

It’s hugely effective. In fact you can treat the JCW like an Impreza or Evo, hurling it into corners, mashing the throttle and letting the technology take care of the rest. It’s great fun, giving the JCW an eager, tenacious, rough-and-tumble, scruff-of-the-neck charm. It’s an absolute riot at roundabouts.

But it has a dark side. Remember the original Focus RS? Now there was a two-faced car – heaven on the right road, hell on the wrong one. Likewise this Mini. Kenny is following in our Audi S5 long-termer and we’re having a blast. The JCW is devastating on some sections of road: nimble, ultra-grippy, changing direction snappily, able to get the power down early, resisting understeer utterly, leaving the S5 gasping – seriously.

And then you hit a bump or a camber or a rut or even a change of surface, and playful becomes handful. Suddenly the wheel tugs in your hands, the nose goes sniffy and the Mini ties itself in knots as it attempts to send torque where it’s needed. It darts and it weaves, and as our art director Paul Lang put it, ‘You end up adopting an elbows-out, gorilla-style posture, wrestling the car, not working with it.’

With John Cooper Works the company having been absorbed into the BMW empire, the JCW was developed in Germany. If it even visited UK roads at all during its gestation, I’d be amazed. Sure, it’s still huge fun to drive, and key Mini elements like the smooth gearchange and the sound build quality are all intact, but here they’re offset by a hectic and occasionally unpredictable personality.

The engine is a real highlight, and the car certainly needed a diff to manage the extra power, but the end result feels part-finished, like time was called before the team got its last orders in. The JCW should be Mini’s mission statement, its this-is-what-we’re-capable-of car. It needs to be that to justify the $ 40K tag and to run with the likes of the Mégane R26.R, let alone Fiat’s terrier-like 500 Abarth. We reckon it’s going to have its work cut out.

Specifications

Engine	In-line 4-cyl, turbocharged
Location	Front, transverse
Displacement	1598cc
Bore x stroke	77 x 85.8mm
Cylinder block	Aluminium alloy
Cylinder head	per cylinder, variable valve timing
Fuel and ignition	Electronic engine management, direct fuel injection
Max power	208bhp @ 6000rpm
Max torque	206lb ft @ 1950rpm
Transmission	EDLC (Electronic Differential
	Lock Control), DTC, DSC
Front suspension	MacPherson struts, coil springs,
	gas dampers, anti-roll bar
Rear suspension	Multi-link, coil springs, gas dampers,
	anti-roll bar
Brakes	316mm ventilated front discs,
	280mm solid rear discs, ABS, EBD,
	CBC, Brake Assist
Wheels	7 x 17in front and rear, aluminium alloy
Tyres	205/45 R17 front and rear,
	ContiSportContact3 SSR run-flats
Weight (kerb)	1205kg
Power-to-weight	175bhp/ton
0-100kph	6.5sec (claimed)
Top speed	238kph (claimed)
Basic price	40,000(Dollar)
On sale	Now
EVO Rating	****

It’s undeniably the grubby end of the stick, but I’m grasping it uncomplainingly. Whilst Ollie got the thrill of turning up to a wonderfully soggy grey factory in the UK at the start of a weekend, I’m dutifully having to put up with humdrum northern Italy on a horribly warm sunny Wednesday morning.

The Fiat Group test track at Balocco always seems surprised to see a bunch of journalists turn up, rather as though the group email didn’t quite get through, and as a result there are always interesting things burbling around that probably shouldn’t be. This time it’s two Ferrari California prototypes, an Alfa 8C with added bulges, and something unusual but distinctly Maserati-like. Yet despite this, I’m actually more excited and tantalised by the prospect of two rows of 500 Abarths that are being kept covered up until after the press conference.

Luca di Meo, CEO of Abarth, attired in the sort of tapered bright red trousers that only an Italian can get away with, greets us all and proceeds to speak floridly on the Abarth brand – racing is key, authenticity is vital, Abarth has very young customers. There’s then some clever outside broadcasting to show us live pictures of a 500 Abarth going around the track. Then some lovely black and white archive footage of a gaggle of 695s racing each other (engine covers propped up, of course).

‘This 500 is definitely an Abarth and not a Fiat. It looks fantastic’

Super stuff, but it feels a bit like me telling you that the 500 Abarth has 133bhp at 5500rpm and 152lb ft at 3000rpm, before going on to explain that it’s got MacPherson struts at the front, a torsion beam at the rear and an anti-roll bar on each axle, when what you really want to know is what it’s like to drive…

The covers are off when we get outside and the little Abarths look fantastic. There are black ones, red ones, some in a sort of primer grey, and then there are the pearlescent white ones. The last of these colours, sheen sparkling in the Milanese sunlight and picked out with red logos, is undoubtedly the one to have.

Where the Mini JCW is still very much a Mini first and foremost, this 500 is definitely an Abarth and not a Fiat. Little scorpions and thunderbolts have replaced all traces of Fiat badging, and the restyling inside and out is thorough enough to make sure that it feels like a new model and not just a tuned one. The changes include a deeper spoiler at the front hiding two new intercoolers, a rear bumper complete with diffuser, a large yet restrained roof spoiler jutting some way out over the rear window and a ride height that has been lowered by 10mm. It looks fantastic.

Inside, the optional leather trim is soft, thick and beautifully stitched (although a cloth-trimmed one I tried later was good too). You sit quite high and it doesn’t feel like there’s a vast amount of room inside, but the gearstick sprouting from the dashboard falls neatly to hand and the flat-bottomed steering wheel is well sized. The big dial under the cowl is both rev-counter and speedo, the former sitting inside the latter, which is not as complicated as it sounds. There is also a dinky boost gauge grafted to the side of the binnacle, with a gearshift indicator that suggests how to be more economical under normal circumstances or tells you to shift at 6000rpm if you’ve selected ‘Sport’ via the lozenge-sized button on the dashboard. It’s worth leaving the Sport button pressed, though, as in normal mode you only get 133lb ft at 2500rpm and the steering has so much assistance it feels like sitting in a chair pretend-driving with a Frisbee.

Although a test track sounds like – and in some ways is – a great place to test a car, I’d give an awful lot to drive the 500 in the Mini’s wheel-tracks in the UK. Balocco is very smooth and this makes it tricky to get an idea of how the suspension will react other than at the absolute limit of grip. The first few laps are taken up with learning exactly which of the many interconnecting circuits you’re meant to be using, but they also reveal that the steering in Sport mode is very well weighted with a consistency that remains all the way from the straight-ahead to full lock.

Soon there are lots of Abarths whizzing around willy-nilly, looking a bit like the ghosts from Pac-Man. I follow one for a while and it looks great as it squirms and wriggles on the brakes with its hazard warning lights flashing (something they do automatically if you trigger the ABS) before squealing into a left-hander, understeering slightly then bumping over the kerbing and accelerating hard, but not overly quickly, up the next straight. Through the faster right-hander at the end of the straight there’s even some attitude at the rear as the driver bottles it slightly midway through.

‘The Abarth looks great as it squirms  and wriggles on the brakes…’

The cars sound good too, a healthy rasp coming from the exhaust of the 1.4 Turbo T-Jet at low revs. The circuit doesn’t actually show the little 16-valver off to its best advantage, because your natural instinct is to keep it spinning all the way to the rev-limiter, where it starts to feel like it has run out of puff, but in fact the engine is thumping most encouragingly between 2500rpm, when the turbo kicks in, and 5000rpm, when it starts to fade out, which should make it wonderfully flexible and fun on the road. And if 133bhp just isn’t enough for you, there will be an Esseesse (pronounced SS) kit that will take power to 158bhp at 5750rpm and torque to 170lb ft at 3000, as well as giving you uprated brakes, all for around $ 4000.

The Abarth, like the Mini, gets its own version of an electronic diff that works through the ESP. Press a button marked TTC (Torque Transfer Control) and traction out of the slower corners is noticeably improved. You can’t turn ESP off, which seems a shame at first but in reality probably isn’t a great loss because it’s very well judged, and I doubt the 500 would be a lift-off-oversteer hero even if you could make the nanny turn a blind eye.

By midday the marshalling around the site seems to be quite relaxed, probably because they’re all trying to avoid the heat by dozing in the shade. So in the name of photography Kenny P and I do a bit of exploring, which happens to take us near the special surfaces. This allows a surreptitious run over a section that looks like a large McCoy’s crisp and reveals that the Abarth is actually very compliant and will not, like the Panda 100HP, give you a headache every time you see a speedbump. I suspect the damping could do with a little more control, however, because as you push up against the Abarth’s limits on the track it occasionally bobs very slightly (particularly at the rear) instead of settling straight into a consistent lean angle. The mid-corner bumps and the generally rougher surfaces of UK roads will be interesting.

One thing that will help it cope is sticking to the standard 16in wheels. The car I drove for most of the day – the one you can see in the pictures – was on optional, and undeniably gorgeous, 17in wheels (which gives you a good idea of how big the little 500 actually is). These gave a slightly crisper turn-in and the Pirelli P Zero Neros certainly gripped a bit harder, but the 16in wheels shod with ContiPremiumContact2s gave the Abarth a more fluid feeling and made the front end more engaging as it slipped more gradually and allowed you to play with it.

The 500 Abarth is great fun. Where the Mini is enjoyable in the speed it generates and the sense that you’ve got to work hard to hang on, the Abarth is just as enjoyable for the speed it doesn’t generate and the fact that you haven’t got to work hard to feel like you’re bouncing all over the limit. It might not set any dynamic benchmarks, but I didn’t see anyone driving a 500 Abarth anything other than fearlessly flat-out all day long. Very Italian.

Specifications