That R56 popped up in my Instagram this morning. So sweet. I like that it looks basically stock from the outside!

I have a friend who, a while ago, had a minor accident in his R53 Track MINI and he had a guy who started to build a tube frame mid engine, RWD MINI race car based off his MINI. The guy was really good at doing this sort of thing including making the body. The last I saw of it was the frame being almost done and the engine and transmission were put in place. Then I understand the guy disappeared (?) not sure. But none the less, he quit work on it. I would have like to have seen that completed.

Albert will soon be coming out of hibernation and Morris will be going into the shop for some important protection work done. Morris will have PPF installed on the roof and front and rear bumpers. Not sure if I will do more than that.

And, Smokey has a track day coming up in 4 weeks….

I figure that with temperatures above 80 here in the NE, winter is done. That means one thing (well, actually more than one but this is a good one), summer wheels and tires are going on Albert. Continental did the job with their DW tire. These are great street tires with amazing performance in the wet. And there is a huge difference in every aspect from the boat anchor wheels and no handling tires that came as OE on Albert. Why, MINI, why? Why not a decent performance tire and wheel on a performance car? They missed the mark there. But that is all fixed now.

As for wheels… Why make wheels with spokes that stick out past the tire? After 7 years of careful handling of the really nice NM wheels it finally happened - one fell over onto the spokes. Not only did it fall over, it did that dinnerplate thing where it circled around a couple of rotations to make sure the damage was complete… The saving grace was that the wheel that fell over was the same one I curbed a few years back. Still, the wheel is perfect at 12 feet….

Time to enjoy and motor on.

Have you ever wondered how bad the aerodynamics of a Gen 3 MINI are? I have, as it feels like Albert is more of a brick through the air than Smokey (R56S) is. While I know that this presentation is for the S version, vs the JCW like Albert, it still should give some idea of what is going on with the car…

Take a look:

While the last part of this video is pretty useless, I thought that up to that point it was pretty interesting. However, the person doing this video didn’t go into as much detail with the MINI as he has done with other cars, which is a bit disappointing.

"I'm surprised at how effective it it is, especially because of how small it is. That's what she said."

Brilliant.