I ran into a new issue on my 2008 R56 Justa Automatic; the shifter could not be moved out of park position. A quick search brought up stories about Interlock solenoids/yellow gear lights/shifter cassettes/exhaust removal/500 dollar parts.
Reading a bit indicated that my problem was different from all of those discussions. I have no service lights, no codes, and actually no interlock system issue at all.
I simply have a mechanical failure of the shiftknob. Specifically the chrome button on the shiftknob itself won’t move. This button releases the ‘sector latch’ (my term, not MINI’s). The sector latch prevents the shifter from moving between gear positions without pushing the button (so that you can’t accidentally bump the lever from Drive to Reverse, for example). This has to be pushed in order to move the shifter out of Park as well and its failure will mislead one into thinking they’ve a brake interlock problem.
if you have the interlock issue, this silver button will still press in as normal... but the shifter won’t come out of Park.
If the silver button on the shiftknob won’t press in... then you have the same shiftknob problem I have.*edited... I discovered that when viewing this while not logged in (seeing this post as others would see it) that the word "k n o b" is not permitted by the forum's censor settings and this caused my uses of the word in this post to appear as "shift ****". I have now changed this to the newly minted word "shiftknob" to get around the issue. I hope that it worked.

Heres what I did. I removed the shiftknob. I read the book and the internet and learned that all I had to do was pull up. It took some reading to convince me to pull it THAT hard. I can assure you that I applied in excess of 60lbs of force.... and then it popped off.
at that point I found that the silver button would STILL *NOT* move, confirming that the problem was in fact within the shiftknob. At this point, the shifter will now work and this is the roadside fix to get you rolling again; remove shiftknob, drive on, order shiftknob.
I disassembled the shiftknob (pry outward at top of chrome button) and could then see that the flat spring inside had broken and one part of it had become wedged within the mechanism, preventing button movement. I removed the spring parts and put it back together. She had her car back and I’ll order a new shiftknob.



Ready to go back in, sans spring.