I recently bought a 2008 mini cooper. I got it because it would not pass inspection and the P.O. did not want to spend the money to fix it. Ok because this is my hobby car. I have replaced the struts, strut bearings, inside and outside ball joints and the sway arm bushing with a poly bushing. Followed it all with a professional alignment

During normal driving conditions it handles and drives great. under hard cornering it is on rails, BUT, under hard straight line acceleration it will dart left or right at higher RPM. It is just a small dart that corrects itself as soon as the pedal is released even the slightest bit. I have not seen any correlation to when it darts right or left.

I have driven up through the RPM range with a less aggressive acceleration and it does not do this little

It was there during the original test drive, and much more pronounced. I expected that the front end work would cure it, and it certainly lessened it.

I have been all through the front and back suspension looking for any play in any suspension points with nothing obvious. I went back through my work and retorqued everything Any advice on what might be causing this?

 

Torque steer, get used to it. Dont take you hands off the wheel when mashing the pedal or you will be off the road in seconds.

 

Torque steer as mentioned above, any ( maybe almost any) high torque fwd car will have this to varying degrees. My last car had an lsd. It helped a lot but was still there. Minis seem to be a little worse than avrage. But nothing unmanageable as long as you know its coming. From reading around you can spend thousands chacing a fix for this but you probbly wont find it. If you do you'd probbly be rich

 

Your front control arm bushings are probably toast. But even after replacing those the car is still going to do it some. As has been mentioned it's torque steer. Wheel will pull as the tires travel over small dips/imperfections in the road. A diff does help but kind of an expensive "fix".

 

 

Replaced them with Poly bushings.

Seems like I just need to get used to the torque steer in this car. I have never experienced that before. Thanks to everyone who responded

 

What are your alignment numbers? Slight toe out in the front will cause the car to be darty... Add in some torque steer, and it can be a handful.

 

It darts if you never drove a FWD with power before. I would check those LCAB while you are at it.

 

My car used to do the same thing and I too wasn't used to it, in addition, my car used to hop which I'm assuming was from bad shocks, so my problem with compounded with issues, and I became fearful to drive my car hard! Had to baby it all the time which I hated. Anyway, yes, new control arms on the front is part of the fix but I think keeping the softer bushings helps eliminate front vibration. Even though you didn't mention having vibration, but sometimes folks will try and and do an upgrade over stock with certain polyurethane bushings on their control arms which end up being too hard. Although you may not want to do this, but I wound up getting wider wheels and tires, so now I have 17x8's on with 215 (not 205) tires and then got some bilsteins. I also drive with my car with the sport button ON because that tightens the steering up a bit, and in the end ALL THAT has been my fix. I can tell you that if you try to get out the hole really quick on uneven pavement you will still feel torque steer, but overall it will be far less dart than it was.