MINI X-raid ALL4 Racing 2016 Review

MINI X-raid All4 Racing
First Drive
Rovaniemi, Finland

Question: you’ve got a spare million euros burning a hole in your pocket and you don’t want to put yet another Bugatti or limited-volume Ferrari, McLaren, Lamborghini or Porsche into a collection that spends all its time in humidity-controlled stasis. Besides, you don’t want one of them because your driveway is unpaved.

It’s not just unpaved, but it’s never seen a grader blade, and it’s basically huge rocks, sand dunes, dry riverbeds and virgin countryside.

You scout around and decide the Mercedes-Benz G 63 6X6 AMG is just a bit flashy and, besides, you’re not really a Mercedes kind of person.

There’s a solution at hand, though. MINI has a car that costs a million euros.

Yes, MINI, with pricing that lives mostly in the premium hatch zone, also takes a massive, running leap to $A1.5 million.

This is clearly not an ordinary MINI. It’s the Dakar version of the Countryman, built to tackle the Dakar (and the Cross Country World Cup that’s almost incidental) and it’s proven itself to be pretty good at it.

It was pipped at the post by Peugeot this year (though that’s under protest), but it won four straight from 2011, delivering nine of the top 12 drivers in 2014 and four of the top five in 2015.

Clearly, it’s not built on a MINI production line in Oxford. It’s built in Germany by a company called X-raid, which was founded by a bloke called Sven Quandt. And he and his sisters and mother own the controlling stake in MINI’s parent company, BMW.

Even having a spare mill in change isn’t enough, though. X-raid will take you out for a test drive and if they don’t think you’re good enough, they won’t sell you the car. Too dangerous, they say.

If you pass muster, you can buy it, then give them a lazy €800,000 to run it for you at the Dakar, or just lease one for not much less anyway. For that, you’ll get a tribe of spannermen and engineers and specialists, plus all the parts you need to get through the event, including a mountain of Michelin 245/80 R16 raider rubber. But it doesn’t include insurance...

MINI fielded 12 of them on this year’s Dakar, which was a much harder ask than the four machines Peugeot trotted out and makes the world’s hardest motorsport event almost a MINI club meet.

So far, X-raid has built 17 All4 racers (though the chassis numbers run to 18, because there's no 13), all with the same core specifications, built to the sometimes strange dictates of the FIA and the Dakar’s own rules (it won’t hurt to think of it like the world of sports cars and how that fits with the Le Mans 24 Hour race, which has a few oddball rules of its own).

That’s why it weighs 1952.5kg. The production-based 3.0-litre BMW inline six-cylinder diesel engine block is turbocharged, so it gets put through an equivalence formula and ends up at the same minimum weight as a raider with a 5.0-litre atmo motor.

There is good and bad in that. The bad is obvious. Two tonnes does not a race car make. It strains the already terribly strained go, stop and don’t-bounce bits, adds to the fuel consumption and drags the straight-line speed down to just 180km/h.

If you don’t think fuel economy is relevant, then consider this: on something like an NEDC cycle, the All4 Racing uses about 16L/100km. On a dirt road at race pace, that lifts to somewhere between 42 and 46L/100km and it jumps again to up to 62L/100km in sand.

That’s why it needs 385 litres of fuel capacity.

The upside is that X-raid could afford to build in phenomenal strength into the roll cage that provides the basis of the car. There are a few MINI and BMW road car parts smattered through it, but it’s largely a custom-built machine that only happens to look like a MINI Countryman. From certain angles, in dim light.

It’s about nine per cent wider than the Countryman, at 1998mm, and it’s 4333mm long, with a 2900mm wheelbase, all of which are governed by the FIA. Into this arrangement, X-raid tries to squeeze the standard, heated Countryman windscreen, which doesn’t quite fit. That’s why the right-hand A-pillar is a lot wider than the left-side one.

The rules also see them steer clear of exotic materials to build the core of the car, but X-raid has gone as close as they could, building it out of aircraft/military-grade tubular 1.7735 high-strength steel (the FIA mandates the wall thickness), then they bolt on a carbon-kevlar body. The only titanium in the car is in the six-piston brake callipers.

They don’t mess around underneath, with two custom-engineered Reiger dampers and 320mm AP racing discs and a 32kg wheel-and-tyre combination per corner.

The engine sits behind the cockpit and drives through a two-plate AP Racing clutch and a six-speed sequential Sadev gearbox. The XTrac centre differential is taut and the front and rear differentials can be locked and unlocked from inside the cabin at the push of a button.

There are some major differences to the Peugeot Dakar racer we were piloted in a couple of weeks ago, mostly down to different rules for buggies (which covers the Peugeot) and the all-wheel drive cars.

The most obvious is that the Peugeot is 500kg lighter and has a bigger air inlet restrictor, which means it actually has more power than the MINI, but roughly the same torque. That’s assuming you can believe either MINI or Peugeot when they quote power and torque figures, and we have been around long enough not to.

The rear-drive Peugeot also had 460mm of suspension travel and the rules allow it to have even more if they want it, and can turn a knob on the dashboard to adjust its tyre pressures on the run. The MINI’s travel is restricted to 250mm, and has restrictions on its approach, ramp-over and departure angles. MINI crews can also adjust the tyre pressures as often as they like, provided they climb out and do it manually.

There are other, critical restrictions, including areas where Peugeot can custom-build parts and MINI has to use production pieces. The intercooler on the MINI is a standard BMW part, as is the air-conditioner’s MINI-sourced radiator.

With temperatures climbing up to 70 degrees inside the cabin, the standard MINI air-conditioner hurls 20-degree air at the crew. Finnish ex-WRC driver Mikko Hirvonen has begged them for a more powerful air-conditioner, though Dubai’s 2015 Dakar winner Nasser Al-Attiyah says he would rather not have one at all, which was probably a bluff.

The car we ended up in was the one Hirvonen raced to fourth place on his first Dakar this year, and it’s immediately a more comfortable place to be than the Peugeot. For starters, it’s easier to get in and out of, with bigger door openings and more leg, head and footroom, though it’s tight.

The engine sits where the rear seats would normally be, then there’s a tremendous array of electronic gizmos, ranging from two navigation units, two car data screens, an electronic compass and a MoTec readout. None of this is for the driver to bother with, though. He gets just an electric tacho, a speed readout (there are speed-limited zones through towns) and a gearshift indicator.

There might be a lot of weight to carry, but exactly zero kilograms have been invested in sound deadening. It’s not terribly important in the Dakar, especially when the drivers all wear helmets with built-in noise-suppression earphones.

That’s why nobody looks much concerned when the MINI kicks over with all the elegance of a huge, yellow-painted thing climbing out of an open-cut mine. Even at idle, you can hear its gigantic turbocharger and you can see things visibly vibrating around the cabin.

But the clutch pedal is easy to use. It’s light and progressive and, besides, with 800Nm of torque at 2100rpm, it’s a hard car to stall.

It eases out of its tented garage with just a slight drop in its deep, loud, lumpy idle before moving into the frozen Finnish countryside. We are heading for a frozen lake, which gives us five minutes of acclimatisation before we have to figure out the MINI’s attacking prowess.

This bit isn’t terribly taxing on the 3.0-litre turbo-diesel, but the big surprise is the transmission. The six-speed sequential unit is managed via a tall, white-topped gear lever just to the right of the steering wheel and you use it with or without the clutch, and with or without a lift of the throttle.

And it’s a darling of a thing to use, with even the works drivers telling us they love it. Every shift, up or down, feel positive and fast and robust. Each shift bangs home with the feel of two heavy metal ingots being smacked together and you’re never in doubt that you’ve got the one you wanted. They change the oil in the gearbox every second day on the Dakar, because they’re so strong that’s about all they need to do.

It’s a low-revving engine, with the power peak arriving at only 3250rpm, though it revs up beyond 4000rpm. The engineers suggest we should pull gears at the power peak, but the drivers all rev it until the last shift light comes on at 4200.

It’s so strong, everywhere, that it doesn’t much matter when you shift it. Punch the throttle in top gear from just 40km/h and the MINI surges forward urgently, accompanied by the whistling blast of the turbocharger.

We tried a couple of standing-start blasts, with the All4 scrabbling for traction from, well, all four, jumping away with very little wheelspin but with diffs so tight that it torque steered left-right-left-right repeatedly up to 140km/h or so.

It gets away well, but it’s not in the league of, say, a road-going Mitsubishi Lancer Evo, much less a Group N one, and that’s despite running on spiked ice rally tyres. At a best guess, the 0-100km/h sprint feels like it takes about seven seconds or so.

The upside is that it will do just about the same acceleration number whether it’s on a made road or clambering across rocks or pulling itself through snow. The comparison with a Group N rally car is an interesting one, because the MINI feels exactly like a Group N rally car that is slower, heavier, harder to stop and with a much higher roll centre.

It takes more stopping (because it weighs about 700kg more), but the higher roll centre actually helps it to turn quickly, with little steering inputs. The big turbo doesn’t allow for massively precise throttle inputs, so you end up using a lot more small steering inputs to make it change direction and to manage its drifts than you would in a rally car.

All the while, that engine is managing to sound a lot more interesting than you could possibly imagine. It does a lot of work to sound angry and excited and brutal than you’d think it ought to, given how low it revs. There is depth, but there’s an urgency to the exhaust note and the turbocharger overlays that with a whistling dervish of exertion.

It feels much more at home travelling sideways than it does in a straight line, and it feels much more at home in faster corners, in third and fourth gear, than it does on the tight, hairpin-laden ice lakes we were mustered onto.

There is very little steering lock, so every turn has to be managed by a slide before you get the MINI anywhere near the apex. Fail at this and you end up using more road on the exit than there often is road.

Get it right, though, and the All4 turns any road into one long wave waiting to be surfed. It is at its best sliding and it can change direction far faster than you think it ought to, with just a hard, left-footed dab on the brake pedal bringing its tail further around to tuck into tightening corners.

But once it begins to understeer midway through a corner in second gear, it is a difficult beast to pull back to your preferred drifting angle. If you don’t resort to the handbrake, you more or less have to back off the throttle and wait again.

The centre differential is so tightly wound, with so little slip, that fast corners just need a tiny lift off of the throttle -- or, at worst, a light left-foot dab -- to refocus the front-end before you can stand back on the throttle again. It’s in fast, flowing bends that it draws the closest comparison to Group N rally cars, when its weight is not such a hindrance.

Unlike the Peugeot, it does its best to corner with a flat body stance, which lets you feel more of what goes on beneath the tyres, especially at the front. Peugeot drivers have to guess what it was they just run over, but MINI drivers know.

2016 MINI X-Raid All4 pricing and specifications:
Price: $1.5 million
Engine: 3.0-litre inline twin-turbo six-cylinder diesel
Output: 235kW/800Nm
Transmission: Sadev six-speed sequential
Fuel: 16L/100km (tarmac)
CO2: Not applicable
Safety rating: TBC