The Rover Mini Cooper Sport 500

they rust, probably more so than early ones,

Steve.

Ahhh crap!

Nothing a few days with waxoil cant sort out if you find a good one,

Steve.

As someone who owns one of the later cars, my advice would be to avoid them. The workforce were so demoralised by the running down of the company by BMW that the cars are very poorly screwed together and the rustproofing was patchy, to say the least. My '97 car has already had the sills patched twice and now needs attention to the area below the headlights - as do most of them. I've also had the usual batch of build quality-related problems with the electrics..... including, most recently, fuses blowing due to chafed wiring on poorly located parts of the loom. I've also had to replace the throttle body to cure an air leak which was causing an MoT emissions failure.

Tuning options are limited as well because of the injection, ecu and cat. You are much better off with an earlier carburettor car in this respect. On the other hand, the cars do cruise well on the motorways -

85 to 90 mph all day - which is great if you do long motorway journeys. Avoid the sportspack cars, though. Apart from looking ill-proportioned on their over-size wheels, they are also slower and don't handle as well.

Seriously, if you have a few thousand pounds to spend on a decent Mini, you're best bet is to get a specialist to build up a car for you around a decent shell and a pre-cat identity. Then you can choose you're perfect spec and have all the rust-proofing you want.

Regards, David Betts snipped-for-privacy@minilist.org The Mini Gallery:

only bad thing with minis is rust, look at this pic, rust from the inside out on the roof, rust will always appear in the most unexpected places,

Steve.