Getting to Know Your MINI Cooper , your New Best Friend. Friends should be fun and the MINI Cooper is for sure first in class.

Getting the Maximum from Your New MINI Part 1. Hot to buy the MINI of your dreams. It's all in the heritage of the Mini Cooper.

Getting the Maximum from Your New MINI Part 2

Getting the Maximum from Your New MINI Part 3 Contents: Serious Minis for Track, Autocross and Touring , Making Your Mini More Responsive, Making Your Mini More Responsive, Increasing Reliability and Safety, Basic Autocross Techniques  and more

MOTORING: Getting the Maximum from Your New MINI Part 4,Competitive Motoring

Finding a Few More Horses With the modifications to the engine that were suggested in Section 2, it is possible to bring the engine’s power to well over 200 horsepower.

If you are thinking seriously about extensive touring, perhaps on less-than-smooth backroads, or you’re going to be doing much track time, sooner or later you will probably find yourself hitting a bump in a road, or taking an unintended off-track excursion

Track Day Driving Techniques- With some practice on the track, or on the autocross course, or preferably both, and some focused attention to your driving techniques while on the road, you should be getting a feeling for driving a high-performance automobile well.

Competitive autocrossing is a great alternative or supplement to track days. In autocross events, yours is the only car on the course while you’re running, so you don’t need to worry about anyone else getting in your way, or worse. Speeds are typically slower than on the track, so if something should go wrong, you are more likely to be able to deal with it than you might on the track

Even if there aren’t any opportunities for track days or autocrossing in your local area, or you just don’t feel comfortable putting your new MINI through that kind of ordeal, touring can be a great way to enjoy time with friends, see the scenery and sights in your region, and have some fun with your MINI.

When Going Faster Becomes a Passion If you’ve taken the opportunity to take your MINI out on a road race course for club track days, or gone autocrossing as a novice in order to learn more about your car’s capabilities and improve your own driving skills, you’ve probably discovered how much fun th...

Competition Upgrades for Your MINI When you get to the point that you want to take your MINI driving to the next level and get seriously involved in autocrossing and track events, you’ll need to add some safety gear to the car to meet most organizations’ requirements. Also, as you reach a point in ...

A Primer for Novice Racers No book can begin to give you all the information you need to be competitive on the race track, much less the experience that makes the real difference. You’re going to need to attend several days of race driving school, with classroom sessions interspersed with on-track ...

Buying Your New MINI Inspired by the enormously popular Austin Minis and Morris Mini Minors produced in the millions from 1959 to 1999, the new MINI by BMW combines the efficient package and sporting heritage of its predecessors with thoroughly modern technology, creating an automobile that is both fun and practical to own.

If you’re considering buying a MINI, you’ve probably already gone to the MINI website, www.MINIUSA.com, to see for yourself what all the hub-bub is about. The website provides a neat way to look at all the options and do some thinking long before you have to sit across the table from a dealer representative.

Now that you’ve spent some time thinking about your ultimate goals, and how fast you want to get there, we can help you sort through the choices you’ll need to make before you sign the order form and start counting the days

Before you jump in your current transportation module and head out to your MINI dealer, let’s take the time to go over a few basic driving tips that you’ll be able to use when you buy your new MINI.

You’ve probably already been impressed by how good the MINI is at what it does. It’s quick off the mark, fast on the highway, and can zip around corners at an enviable clip with almost no body sway or looseness.

Now that we’ve spent some time explaining where engine performance comes from, and how to get more out of your MINI Cooper S or Cooper, we need to inject a note of reality.

Taking it to the Track In many of the street-driving schools conducted at regular race tracks, the curriculum often includes the opportunity to drive some “hot laps” on the track.

Serious MINIs for Touring, Track and Autocross If you’re working your way through this book one step at a time, by now you have gotten a few weeks or months experience with your MINI. We also hope you have taken the opportunity to participate in a basic one-day driving school where you got more ...

Making Your MINI More Responsive In an earlier section of this book, we suggested that you could enhance the performance of your MINI by making a few changes to the engine, upgrading the air intake, supercharger, ECU, and exhaust. We think that any MINI on the street can benefit from the added hor...

Once again we’re back to trade-offs. For the average driver, with average passengers, the ability of the car to absorb bumps without rattling the dentures of gran’pa in the back seat is at least as important as how fast the car will get around corners.