I’ve always loved cars but like most regular people, I never enjoyed waxing them. I remember spending all day waxing my car by hand and getting only half of it done. I’d be lucky to get the whole car done by the end of the year. I just wanted to drive them. The MINI Cooper was the first cars that I truly identified myself with. The first MINI I saw in person was a silver 2002 MINI. At the time, I really liked the look of the Audi TT but it was far out of my price range.

The first thing I did was rent a 5 speed MINI Cooper for a week and that sealed the deal. My wife at the time thought the MINI was noisy, uncomfortable, and she was sure that once I had it for a week that I wouldn’t want it anymore. This R55 Clubman S would be the third MINI I’ve owned. My first was an Indi Blue 2003 R50 Cooper that I bought from Roadshow MINI in Memphis, TN and drove it back to California. I kept it for a few years and sold it for a broken Jet Black 2005 R53 Cooper S model that I fixed up.

This is my Indi Blue 2003 MINI Cooper. Its known as an R50. It was a great car but had the infamous Midlands tranny which was known to blow up prematurely, so I ended up selling it for a broken supercharged 2005 R53 MINI. This is my friend Doug Ioki. He’s an electrical wizard! He’s helped me on every car we’ve owned since the early 1980’s. Here is installing my Moss MINI Rally Light Bar.

Here’s the 2005 MCS I found on the local enthusiast MINI forum. The MINI was originally traveling from Wisconsin to Hawaii but broke down and was being stored in Long Beach port while the owner had to continue on to Hawaii without his car. Instead of coming back to California and fixing it, he decided to sell it to me.

A lot of money went into this build but it was a great deal of fun!

I had a lot of work done by RMW. I was considering getting it stroked and doing other mods, but I never got that far. Instead I just built it out for strength, with a better head, headers, intake, exhaust, small pulley and tune. It was on coilovers, Wilwood BBKs, interior was painted and redone. 222 HP with a stock power of 163 HP was pretty impressive.

However just like my first MINI, this one became extremely unreliable and expensive to maintain, so I ended up selling it.

One of the exciting parts of ordering a MINI was configuring it online. I tried several variations before I arrived at the bottom configuration where I had planned to further customize it myself. My wheels were originally from Edgeracing and had a silver inner lip. After a year, the paint flaked off, so I had them stripped and powder coated black and red and used them on my R53. The lug bolts on the R55 were a little bigger so the holes had to be drilled out to make them fit.

I installed H&R Street Performance Coilovers, Magnaflow Exhaust, Intake. The OEM noise maker was removed as well as a variety of simple performance mods. A stiffer swayer was also installed.