During the past couple of years, the BMW-built Mini Cooper has become one of the most popular race cars in the 24 Hours of Lemons series. Why is that? Cheap parts, that’s why!
The crapcan road-race car-selection formula of fully depreciated + manual transmission + pretty quick + easy to find in junkyards was most applicable, ten or 15 years back, to something like a Civic/Integra, Neon or SN95 Mustang. I thought the Chevy Cobalt/ Pontiac G5 would take over for the 2020s, but the Mini Cooper now outnumbers those GM Death Watch mobiles about 20:1 in Lemons racing.
These cars are great fun on a race track, although reliability can be very BMW-ish (i.e., maddening electrical/computer glitches are commonplace).
In 2021, I decided I was going to put together a “Minipocalypse” article. I visited a few car graveyards in Colorado and California and shot so many doomed Minis that I gave up on the project due to Photograph Overload.
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Author: Murilee Martin
