Used Car Review – Mini Cooper S
With the release of the New Mini Cooper S and the Cooper S JCW, old style used Mini Cooper’s are becoming more affordable.
Powered by the famous 1.6 litre supercharged engine with 160bhp, the Mini Cooper S will reach 60mph in 7 seconds and power onto its 138mph top speed.
The Mini Cooper S that I drove was a 2005/05 reg which was an ex-dealership car when it was new, which means that it was fully loaded, including the 17” white alloy wheels accented by a white roof with white mirror caps and stripes on the bonnet.
On the interior of this Mini Cooper S was a Harmon/Kardon sound package which sounds crisp with just the right about of bass for easy Sunday morning driving music. Along with a full leather interior, electronic climate control and a sunroof, this used car was very well specced at the time it was ordered from the dealers.
Driving the Mini Cooper S was a solid drive, with a really good solid feel to it. The clutch was easy to use, light for the feet but feeling quite solid for a really good build quality feel through the pedals. The steering was light around city centre driving, but going on a Sunday afternoon drive in a national limit zone, the steering adapted to this giving me some good feedback of what the front wheels were doing.
Planting the throttle down to the floor, makes the immense supercharger whine like it wants to jump out of the engine, shifting up the gears, the supercharger noise is renewed each time you change and when you let off, the centre exhausts makes burbly noises as well as the odd over fuelled ‘pop’ at certain RPMs.
The Mini Cooper S I test drove was on the forecourt at £9,500 which first seemed overpriced, but when I looked into it and found the original receipt for the new car, it was way over £20,000 with most of the options boxes ticked on the order form. So maybe £9,500 wasn’t a bad price after all. Doing the usual checks found a few dents and scratches that the dealership was happy to agree to a price of £8995 - which was simply an offer hard to refuse.
Take a look in our used car section to find your own Mini Cooper S, maybe even the Cooper S Works GP model, a limited edition Mini where only 2000 were built and only a limited number of 459 came to the UK.
09-Feb-2010
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