INTERNATIONAL LAUNCH: Luke-warm contender in the hot hatch club
This car business can be a depressingly relentless biosphere of rapid evolutionary development. Things that don’t sell well enough for the business plan die quickly. Mini quietly shed the Coupe and lost the Paceman, too. And didn’t it have two convertibles a few months ago? Things that sell well simply seem to mature into more of the same, usually longer or wider but visually similar. Ideas that worked on something once are often shoved screaming against their will into unworthy vessels and even successful revolutions only ever deliver the briefest of advantages. The whole John Cooper Works (JCW) thing started out as an idea that worked in a package that didn’t. That supercharged four-pot quickly overpowered the Cooper hatch that tried to swallow it and turned it into a wildly-shrieking, barely-guided missile. The simplest way to fix that would have been all-wheel drive, but that wasn’t in Mini’s DNA at the time. Instead, that original ill-discipline turned JCW into a badge that tod...
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