Does anyone know why on Mini's website they give numbers for 0-60, 1/4 mile and so on, but when I read many different auto magazines, their numbers tend to be faster. Is Mini doing this for insurance purposes maybe, kind of how Detroit put out lower numbers during the late 60s to keep insurance lower? Or something else maybe?

 

More than likely the manufacturer is being careful that they dont publish numbers which dont turn out to be realistic "in the real world". If they did then they might be held accountable and made to pay big bucks to make the cars able to produce the numbers advertised or more likely, have to pay a settlement in a class action lawsuit. Magazine tests will often publish the "best" times they run. And who knows, maybe their equipment is skewed towards faster times slightly, etc. I may be wrong but I dont believe insurance rates are determined by how fast a car is. What the car typically costs insurance companies to insure is more likely to be the determining factor.

 

That is a bigger issue in other parts of the world than in the US I believe. But in any case, I believe yes, there's some of that to it.

But in addition, there's a fantastic automotive engineering simulation program called CarTest2000. Every imaginable aspect of the driving forces and resistances/drags on a car are configurable.

One of the neat features is the ability to simulate & optimize time to distance and time to speed (of any speed or distance you want) differently depending on "clutch slip" or "clutch dump" starts -- and you can configure coefficients of static & kinetic friction of the tires, clutch engagement times... yadayadayada @ nausea). Point of all this being the 1/4 mile or 0-60 speeds are from 0.5 or more seconds longer doing a clutch slip start compared to a clutch dump start (all because of how fast you release the left foot, which is likely to go much slower than you think)... guess which one the manufacturer uses and which one the auto rags uses when testing.

oh, and p.s. with the JCW's turbo spool rpm & simulation based on measure @ the tire torque curve from folks who dyno'ed it optimal start is around 2000rpm give or take 100.