Ride and handling
To facilitate the much publicized ‘go-cart’ like handling, the MINI Convertible is sprung quite stiffly. It’s not your everyday car, and if you expect it to take the potholed Indian roads in its stride with ease, you’d probably be too optimistic. The ride quality is taut and though slightly softer than the even harder S grade suspensions, still qualifies as stiff enough. We had a tough time traversing the 20km rough stretch from Aamby Valley to Club Mahindra’s Lake Pavana Resort. The road to the resort is in a bad shape, and we had to practice extreme caution to ensure occupants’ comfort as well as car’s own health.
The steering is quite well weighed and direct though. It’s appreciably communicative and managed to let us feel the wavy imperfections on the Mumbai – Pune concrete expressway rather clearly. Though not as heavy as the S variants’ wheel in Sport mode, the steering on the Convertible is well-weighed enough to prevent us from having any complaints.
Where the MINI Convertible excels is on smooth, well paved roads where it delights the driver with its incredibly sure footed handling and communicative steering. The smooth twisties on the way to the Aamby Valley are just the kind of roads the machines from the MINI stable are meant for. Even with the FWD layout, there isn’t any unnerving understeer and the MINI Convertible’s three spoke wheel feels uncannily neutral and direct around bends.
As discussed earlier, the relative lack of power and a slow transmission does sometimes rear up as a hindrance while negotiating sudden and sharp uphill corners. The Convertible still comes across as a bagful of fun around ghats though. This holds especially true while going downhill where the short wheelbase machine simply dazzles you with its amazing levels of grip and terrific balance. Road, tyre and engine noise is more audible than on a fixed hardtop and in all honesty we would rather have those sounds than not on a convertible.
There isn’t any dearth of steering feel, or grip, or balance with the MINI – just that it’s too stiffly sprung to negotiate undulations. It’ll reward the driver as long as it’s running on well paved, smooth roads, but the Convertible hates imperfections on the tar – even the minor ones. It tends to bounce and skip over them. We had a blast driving back from the pristine twisties of Lonavala, but had to consistently keep an eye for the rough surfaces.
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A befitting review for a wonderful and desirable car 🙂