Here’s Your First Look At The New Petrol-Powered Mini JCW

The upcoming high-performance Cooper will make its debut in this year’s Nürburgring 24 Hours

20 May 2024

Mini is one of the only brands keeping the faith in the small hot hatch, as we’ve already seen with the new fourth-gen Cooper S. Happily, that won’t even be the spiciest version available, with a John Cooper Works in the, erm, works, to sit at the very pointiest end of its range.

True to its performance remit, the new car will make its first appearance not in roadgoing guise, but as an entry in the gruelling Nürburgring 24 Hours, taking place from 1 to 2 June.

Technical details on the new car are scant for now, but Mini has said it’ll use its Twin-Power Turbo engine, suggesting it’ll be a development of the 2.0-litre unit used by the old JCW (that’s not a twin-turbo setup by the way, but a single twin-scroll turbocharger). That made 227bhp in the third-gen car, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see a slight uplift from that.

What it almost definitely won’t have, sadly, is a manual gearbox. Mini officially confirmed in 2023 that there were no plans for any petrol fourth-gen Mini to get three pedals, and that includes the hardest, most focused member of the family.

We’ll have to wait until autumn to see the roadgoing car, but the racing version – dubbed the Mini John Cooper Works Pro – should give us a pretty good idea of what it’ll look like. Even with the disguise it’s wearing in these images – a homage to the iconic red-and-white rally Minis of the 1960s – we can pretty clearly see how it’ll look. Compared to the latest petrol Cooper S, there are chunkier bumpers and a funky rear spoiler arrangement. That rear diffuser with a tiny central pipe looks quite racy though, so we’re not sure that’s production spec.

The competition version will make its debut for the N24’s first practice sessions, which kick off on 30 May. It’ll be entered in the SP 3T category by Bulldog Racing, which is also running an old-shape, manual JCW in the round-the-clock race.

The roadgoing car, meanwhile, is highly likely to be the last combustion-powered JCW, and will itself be sold alongside the first electric Mini to wear the brand’s highest-performance badge. In the absence of any proper rivals – arguably barring the Toyota GR Yaris – now the Ford Fiesta ST and Hyundai i20 N are gone, it’ll likely be a de facto class leader among baby hot hatches, and quite probably one of the last of its kind.

The first full sentence spoken by an infant Mike was a review of the ride quality of a Volvo 850. It was “Daddy’s car goes bumpy-bump on a bumpy road,” so would probably need proofreading a bit, but it was a start.