Is this the fastest Mini ever?
Several thousand folks who turned out for the Mini United Festival in Le Castellet, France over the weekend got a pleasant surprise: the first look at what the British maker is billing as “the fastest Mini ever.”
Dubbed the Mini John Cooper Works GP, it offers some extensive upgrades to the already impressive Mini JCW and data from testing on the legendary German Nurburgring suggest it will deliver some blazingly fast performance.
While Mini is yet withholding some specific data, a report out of Britain hints the John Cooper Works GP will make 214 horses compared to the current JCW’s 208. That apparently brings the 1.6-liter 4-cylinder engine to a specific output, in European terms, of 100 kW per liter pretty darned close to the vaunted likes of Nissan’s GT-R.
What we do know for sure is that the concept revealed at the Mini United Festival features a front fascia designed to suck in substantially more air, with some nice new aero-enhancing details, such as side skirts and a rear diffuser, along with a carbon-fiber wing mounted above the backlight. There are distinctive new wheels and aggressive red accents around the front air scoops, as well as new, lipstick-red sideview mirrors.
The Mini John Cooper Works GP reportedly lapped the Nurburgring in 8:23.
What we also know, according to Mini, is that the John Cooper Works GP pulled the maker’s fastest-ever lap of the Burburgring, at 8:23, about 19 seconds quicker than that previously recorded by a Mini Cooper S with the earlier JCW GP kit.
Mini suggests the new model will debut later this year and will be limited to about 2,000 total units of production.
As for pricing, expect the Mini John Cooper Works GP to push somewhere into the low to mid-$40,000 range.