As I have attested in our he says, she says review, the Mini has been in my blood since before I was born. I'm not high on the list of its potential haters, it's fair to say. But in the case of the Countryman variant, I have never quite "got" it.
Perhaps I need to add the caveat “in the UAE”, because its makers claim that it accounts for about a third of all Mini sales worldwide. And on its recent launch in rural England, the sterner-looking, more-mature sibling admittedly made much more sense.
It takes a fairly tame off-road experience in England for things to fall into place. The short, slightly muddy trek confirms that if your main purpose for buying the car is as a runaround along countryside tracks to feed your livestock and mend fences, then it will ably cope. But for the truly rough stuff – which aside from mounting kerbs and traversing sandy car parks, is pretty much everywhere not on the roads in the Emirates – then you suspect it won’t have a hope.
Its off-road ability is also called into question once or twice on a free drive in the country lanes surrounding our first night’s stopover in Oxfordshire and into my native Gloucestershire. Sadly, on a few occasions when it’s necessary to put two wheels of the all-wheel-drive Mini onto muddy verges to pass other cars on narrow, car-and-a-half-wide roads, the Countryman feels twitchy and not at all grippy, even at low speeds.
It’s much more able on the tarmac, along delightfully tight roads where I tick off stereotypical rural obstacles such as groups of horse riders and a tractor pulling a manure cart within the first hour in the car. It does feels a little too heavy in corners, though – its extra height not helping and making the Cooper S All4 incarnation something of a sledgehammer when all you need is a basic set of tools.
Even in Sport mode, it’s not quite as rapid as its sister cars, but it does trundle along quickly enough up to speed limit, although a few in-car irritations distract me when I should be concentrating on the road. The indicators rarely self-cancel when you’re just changing lane, which almost encourages you to not bother signalling (hey, should be a top-seller here, then) and the automatic wipers option seems to have trouble dealing with drizzle or large dollops of rain. Obviously, this is of no concern for about 48 weeks a year in the UAE. More troubling is the fact that the brakes could be a smidgen more convincing.
The cynical among us might take the black, white and grey Union Jack badge that sits on the steering wheel, a design repeated on the back of the headrests, as a sign of the times. Those who have driven the regular and Clubman editions can argue otherwise, and that’s kind of the sticking point with the Countryman. It’s larger than its stablemates, sure, and we all know how bigger is better could almost be a national maxim in this part of the world. Yet the sum total of the other real-world benefits remain still beyond me, I’m afraid. Give me a wad of dirhams and I’ll head to the dealer for a straight-up Cooper S and never look back.
aworkman@thenational.ae
