Hasta La Ideas

The weather in the Arctic was, as you can imagine, freezing cold. I’d been to the Arctic once before, in Sweden, and they had a saying there: “There is no bad weather—only bad clothes.”

Perhaps MINI should adopt the phrase “There are no bad roads—only bad cars.” Which is to say, the driving conditions in Rovaniemi were not pleasant—roads were covered in snow, ice, or a mixture of both—and to prove their cars could handle it, they set us journalists loose on twisty, slippery test tracks with their cars. (These were not actual tracks, but car-width areas of directionality through the wilderness, demarcated by cones and featuring plenty of curves.)

Rauno Aaltonen was on hand to check that our physical driving positions matched rally standards; as one example, I found that the particular seatback angle I’ve been using for years is off by a couple of inches. Here’s the check Aaltonen taught us: Put your hands at nine and three on the wheel. Now move your left hand across the wheel and grasp three o’clock, with your thumb down, as if you’ve just turned the wheel in that direction. At this point the back of your left shoulder should still be firmly pressed against the seat. “The seat must give you support when you take a hard corner,” Aaltonen explained.

After that it was off to the races. A little personal background: I’m no rally driver, but learned to drive on a five-speed stickshift with rear-wheel drive and no anti-lock brakes. For a couple years I also had to drive through extremely heavy snow, sometimes for up to 10 hours, to get to my first college. So I’m no stranger to stickshifts and adverse weather, and I’d accidentally put my car (and a front-wheel drive car I later owned) sideways on icy highways more than once.

I’ve never been eager to repeat those experiences, and my first instinct while driving in inclement weather is caution. But after one stultifyingly calm lap on the snow track in the All-4 Mini, which handled as if the car was on regular pavement, caution got boring. So I started pushing the car faster and harder. Then it got fun: When you put your foot down and whip it into a corner, the car feels well-balanced and only lets the tail out with predictability; it practically tells you, in a British accent, when to countersteer.

I’m not talented enough to sustain a drift all the way through a hairpin, but I damn sure tried. On the snow and ice track it was easy to force wheel slippage, but very difficult to upset the car, and it was of course impossible to lock the wheels up. I have no experience with British cars, but the stickshift felt positively German.

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