In the hot seat: Is £35k Mini Cooper S a fun, functional daily driver?

This range-topper looks mean, goes fast, steers sweetly and has all those angry red interior trimmings that you have to have in a performance car these days.

Arguably, though, beneath its heavily refreshed bodywork and dazzlingly digitised dashboard, this latest Cooper S is something of a dinosaur. Not in any real physical sense – the drivetrain still feels slick and the cabin doesn’t really want for any technical odds and sods – but conceptually.

With the likes of the Ford Fiesta ST and Hyundai i20 N consigned to the history books, the Cooper S has been left almost unsupported to stand and fight for the survival of the hot supermini.

The Ford Puma ST is too tall and the Toyota GR Yaris far too hardcore to bear comparison, so I make the Volkswagen Polo GTI the only real alternative on the market today – but that’s a comparative minnow in sales terms and is edging towards retirement.

Happily, green shoots of a genre renaissance are sprouting, thanks to EVs, with the Abarth 500e, Alpine A290 and Cooper JCW suggesting that the appeal of a sporting supermini can survive the extinction of rorty little petrol engines.

The new Cupra Raval is being developed with a keen eye on dynamic prowess, too, and stone-hearted are they who don’t feel at least a stir of anticipation at the promise of ‘go kart handling’ from Volkswagen’s first electric GTI car.

But these are fundamentally different beasts, which, despite the best efforts of their engineers, are inherently less mechanically charismatic and must be imbued with all manner of technical trickery to successfully emulate the emotive appeal of their forebears.

They don’t pop, fizz or grunt with the cheery loutishness of their forebears, and it’s far more difficult to set them aside from the humble family runarounds on which they are based.

Say what you like about my Cooper S’s gratuitous John Cooper Works-flavoured bodykit, racing stripes and fruity exhaust note, but there’s no mistaking it for a common-or-garden Cooper C.

And so I suppose I find myself writing something of a eulogy. The hot supermini is a type of car that has contributed more than its fair share of five-star road tests over the years, and of which you can trace the evolution back to such icons as the Peugeot 205 GTi and Renault 5 Turbo.

Even if a brave new electric era awaits (and accounting for the fact that the petrol Cooper S will be on sale until the end of this decade at least), there is undeniably an undercurrent of poignancy to my stewardship of this old stager, and I plan to celebrate every minute of it.

Beginning right now, with an urgent trip to the supermarket. Maybe one a few towns over.

Clean car? No thanks

I always struggle with resisting the urge to clean my car at this time of year: it's a waste of time and money given how quickly the grime and salt accumulates.

But I’m quite enjoying the rally-refugee vibe that the Mini takes on when it's especially caked. It almost feels like a badge of honour: enduring proof of some arduous but enjoyable mid-winter schleps. Plus it obscures the childish racing stripes.

I'm especially glad I didn't shell out on a full detail as it hasn't even been sitting outside my living room window this week - like a car park attendant in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Steve Cropley borrowed it and returned it with double the miles on the odometer.

But rather than drive home backwards and reverse the clock, I’ve been inspired to keep piling them on. Birmingham, Wellingborough, Shirley, Malvern, Sevenoaks… We’ve been everywhere(ish) - and I’ve yet to uncover any major gripes. It's even a decent mobile office. 

Would I buy one?

It’s easy to become desensitised to the exorbitant prices of new cars as they creep, slowly but surely, ever upwards.

Just five years ago, the cheapest new car in the UK was £8000. Today, it’s approaching double that. So I’ll confess I didn’t immediately gulp, gasp or go berserk when I saw £34,500 at the bottom of the spec sheet for our Cooper S.

Given the general state of things, I thought it sufficiently equipped, suitably potent and aspirational enough to warrant price parity with, say, a speccy Audi A3 or a base-level Volkswagen Tiguan.

But after several thousand miles at the wheel, I’m running the numbers and wondering if I’ve been a bit short-changed, particularly when I had such a lovely time with the entry-level Cooper C, which is available for £10,000 less (albeit in our case with two fewer doors).

Sure, you get a healthy bump in power with the S, but rare was the occasion I found the C short on puff, and for the casual driver it’s still more than capable of raising a grin on a country lane.

Plus, the C’s more compliant suspension set-up and smaller wheels make it the more refined proposition on our shattered roads.

A compelling compromise. Some colleagues who drove both variants deemed the Cooper S the superior proposition purely on the basis that it’s equipped with paddle shifters and so offers a smidge of extra driver interaction over the auto-only 1.5-litre car.

But, honestly, after a few exploratory forays into manual mode, I found I’d had my fill of redlining the turbo four-pot and was broadly happy to let it meander through the ratios itself; the engine note isn’t especially flavourful when you rev it out, and the plastic paddles themselves aren’t quite tactile and chunky enough to invite exuberance.

That’s not to say I didn’t have fun. The Cooper’s chassis tune is biased towards keen dynamics anyway, so the uprated brakes and firmer adaptive suspension that come with top-rung Sport trim mean it’s a riot on the right road, with a responsiveness and verve that incentivise you to push it to the limit, and a compact footprint that inspires confidence to let loose even on the tightest country lanes. Or multi-storey car parks, say.

The trade-off, naturally, is a secondary ride that’s persistently fidgety and often tends towards irritatingly harsh. I’ve certainly driven more brittle hot hatches, but stressful suburban commutes were made all the more aggravating by the S’s harsh treatment of speed bumps and potholes.

Happily, that’s about as uncompromising as the Cooper S gets and it falls into that sporting sweet spot of having enough power for a laugh, but not so much that you always have to have your wits about you.

It’s an uncomfortable truth that the UK’s B-roads, by and large, are too poorly finished and confined to really facilitate full-blooded driving in everyday use, so being able to sprint from 0-62mph in just under seven seconds makes the Cooper S feel manageably exciting when the mood takes you – and it’s loud and low enough that it feels faster than that, in any case.

The extra punch doesn’t come at any dramatic cost to efficiency. Over the course of nearly 6000 miles, our 2.0-litre, five-door Cooper S proved barely any thirstier than the 1.5-litre, three-door Cooper C we ran before it, but it’s worth noting that a figure of around 40mpg is looking increasingly unimpressive – even in a quasi-sporting context – as other cars of this size adopt hybrid powertrains in a bid to clean up their act.

It’s a different kettle of fish, sure, but the MG 3 Hybrid we ran recently returned 47.0mpg, and we nudged towards the mid-50s in the Renault Clio Hybrid. With engines that date back to the launch of the previous generation Mini, and no assistance from a belt-integrated starter generator, no flavour of Cooper can come close: penny-pinchers need not apply.

It’s a mixed bag, then, but irrespective of all the pros and cons, the Cooper S is probably one of those cars you buy 60% with the heart and 40% the head – and given the dearth of direct comparisons to make, perhaps it compensates for its shortcomings by simply existing.

Intriguingly, my colleague Murray Scullion’s Mazda MX-5 long-term test car was a pretty close match in price and performance terms and, in light of the erosion of the affordable driver’s car market in recent years, could genuinely be considered a viable rival in its positioning as a circa-£35k thrill-seeker for daily use.

The Mazda is the vastly superior driver’s car, naturally, but then the Cooper S has back seats and a bigger boot so is more usable.

The roadster has a lovely, snickety six-speed manual gearbox too, which is an obvious one-up on the Mini – but the hatchback arguably has the edge in technology and refinement terms, which makes it the better long-distance companion… We could go on.

Ultimately, in a market that’s becoming increasingly shaped by profit-busting emissions legislation and fun-sponge safety rules, I think we can – indeed, we must – celebrate Mini’s commitment to the hot supermini.

While this latest model is a vastly more expensive and upmarket take on the formula than were its predecessors, it remains a relatively affordable gateway sports car in the context of what else is still in showrooms and it would be among my first recommendations for anyone looking for a comfortable, characterful and relatively capacious commuter car that’s capable of loosening its tie on a sunny Saturday afternoon