A Labor of Love - Cooper RSR

Part 1

I may have come from the home of the MINI but the 2006 R53 you see below is the first one that I owned. That is not to say that I did not rub shoulders with Sir Alec Issigonis’s brilliantly designed family car in my misspent youth. Long before hot hatches became popular with the boy racer brigade, racers like Paddy Hopkirk, John Rhodes and BTCC champion Matt Neal’s father Steve took a John Cooper breathed upon Mini to many wins. In fact Niki Lauda and fellow Formula 1 Champions Graham Hill, Jackie Stewart, John Surtees, Jochen Rindt, and James Hunt all drove the BMC econobox early in their careers. And BMC was not shy on taking the ‘Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday’ saying to heart and cars like the 970 S, 1071 S and 1275 S all came to the marketplace fornted by the Cooper moniker. Many of the road cars were pressed into doing double duty and saw action on the circuits, hillclimbs and on rallies at the weekends. So if I never owned one, what did I do? What was my interaction with Minis? Our local car club was one of the few in Scotland that ran a speed hillclimb on a road in Rumster Forest owned by the Independant Broadcasting Association (owners of ITV) The track sneaked through the forrest and favored those brave enough to fully put the pedal to the metal. In fact the first time I ever saw two-time BTCC Champion John Cleland race was at the wheel of a Mini at Rumster. While everyone enjoyed the hilclimb the awards ceremony at Mackay’s Hotel in nearby Wick was a thing of legend and there are many stories

from those nights that cannot be repeated here. CCC also had a healthy autocross scene. Not the autocross we see in North America but something similar to rallycross competing only on grass and against the clock. It was there I got my indoctrination into Minis and it as again Alistair Angus, the same guy that introduced me to karting that was the conduit into the world of the A-Series engine. The one thing about these Scottish farmers and nuclear plant workers was nobody had told them that the 1275 cc that BMC produced, was the biggest engine available and before long Minis were appearing with 1380 and even 1430cc motors. And if you did not have to be a purist or were offended by a non BMC powerplant one even appeared with a 1558cc Lotus Twin Cam motor grafted onto the A-Series gearbox. What about hands on experience with the Minis? Alistair and I had plenty of that with the

different engines that went between the frame rails of his black 1275 GT and then we went big time building a spaceframe Mini featuring Maguire body panels and a Howley Racing 1430cc motor for autocross. So until I came to Canada and we were looking for a project car for MotorWerks Magazine that was my total interaction with the brand. Originally I had thought of getting a BMW e46 M3 as a project car but after hanging around with Alain Lauzière of Equipe/Team Octane and Randy Smalley of RSR Motorports who both ran a team of supercharged MINIs I decided the R53 might be a better choice. It did not take long but I found the 2006 Chili Red R53 shown above on a used car lot in nearby Burlington, ON in 2012. It had just over 60,000 kms on it which was not bad for a six year old car. The only downside about the car was that there was a Carfax report on the car. The dealer told me they did not know why and the report did not detail what the exact damage was. I took the car to my friends at Oakville MINI and they put the car on the hoist and gave it the once over. It looked good and they could see nothing that would have indicted that there had been any severe damage done to the car. Interestingly enough, we found the damage in 2021 when we were turning the car into a full blown race car. The passenger side frame rail seemed to have been straightened at some point but with the engine installed you could not see any damage. And with the car behaving as it should in the intervening years it obviously was not a problem and the chassis was straight. At that point I found out from the Internet that we would have to name the car. All MINIs/Minis are named aren’t they? We came up with Cooper RSR for two reasons; the first being Randy Smalley’s MINI team was called RSR Motorsports and it was a way to say thanks to him for flying the MINI flag. The second was because of the car’s small size, it was a Roller Skate Racer for sure!

So where did we go from there? The plan was to run the car on the road while updating it, keeping it road legal and competing with it at the same time. We took the decision to run with our friends at the BMW CCA Trillium Chapter in their autoslalom series. I had decided to keep the car pretty basic for the first year, so that meant only a couple of updates. The primary one was swapping out the OEM seat for a Sparco Evo 2 seat that was left over my my drag truck project. I always believe that being properly located in your seat makes a huge difference to your driving. The second update had nothing to do with gaining performance but was about checking how consistent my driving was. Being Canada’s only Elite Racepak dealer, the plan was to install a Racepak G2X logger in the car to showcase their products and that would allow me to create a track map on open and closed courses. The unit came with a mini dash that could display lap times, best lap and predictive lap time. As you can see from the photo opposite the unit sits on the back on the back of a folded down rear seat . I attached an aggresive strip of Velcro hooks to the back of the unit and that attached it firmly to the material on the rear of the seat. The data is downloaded via a SD card that is located in the front of the unit and includes lateral, accel and decel g-forces as well as the GPS data. Additional sensors can be attached through the V-Net which is the blue plug seen in the above photo.

The first year of autocross went well. I ran the car with the standard S-Lites (heavy wheels) fitted with the 205/45ZR17 Achilles ATR Sport tires that the car came with. These tires have a wear rating of 400 UTQG and while nowhere where near as competant as an R-Comp tire they did not a bad job at all. The Trillium Chapter ran their events (and still do) in Brampton at the CAA Centre which is a short drive from my home in Oakville. Although the car was road legal I prefered to take it to events in my enclosed trailer that I still had after selling my drag trucks. The trailer was a great asset especially when the weather turned nasty and with a generator onboard a cup of hot coffee was never far away. The car was run in the GS class which was quite well supported with seven cars. One of the great things about autocross at the club level is that it is very friendly. You all have to take turns at marshalling the course during the day and the rapport between competitors made for an enjoyable days motorsport. At year’s end I had done what I set out to do which was taking a bog standard MINI and prove that it can be competitive without getting too serious. I won the class and placed ninth out of 156 drivers overall. Going into year two, I took the decision not to chase a championship but to modify the car with products we could talk about in articles in MWM, after all it is a project car with the intention of eductating and entertaining our readers. One of the first upgrades was to the Euro body kit as fitted to the JCW cars. At the time they were getting rarer than hens teeth but our friends at MINI of Concord sourced us a kit that we had painted by our good buddy Mike Taylor at Taylored by Mike in Grassie, ON. Through our good friend Chris Knox, the only two-time MINI Challenge Champion we got to know the people at CarbonMini. When we put together the R53 MINI Swansong in 2012 and Chris drove for RSR Motorsports in the last two events of the Grand Am season Carbon MINI drove down to Laguna Seca and installed a set of carbon door mirrors and brought a set of carbon door handles for Chris to autograph. They were put up for auction to help pay for Chris’s seat in the two events and my wife Janis bought them for my birthday. They did not add any performance but sure as hell look good. I had always liked the look of the MINI Challenge wing and saw that M7 Tuning had one that looked very similar. It had a GRP lower wing that replaced the OEM wing, two aluminum sideplates and a carbon fiber main element. At the same time as ordering the wing I ordered up a strut brace bar and cold air intake. You will hear all sorts of reports online about the affectiveness of CAIs but for sure it made the car no slower but the sound! The sound on wide open throttle was something else! I was running a Trillium event at the nearby Toronto Motorsports Park that was a blend of autocross/track day (or

track day/autocross if you will) and this kid came up to me after a session and just could not believe how Cooper RSR sounded on track. He event pulled out

his phone to playback a video he had shot. He was spot on; considering the sound was purely induction noise, the car sounded pretty inpressive. At this point it was time to start flying the flag for the magazine and the product partners that were helping out with the build of the car. That meant decals and such like needed to be applied to the MINI to showcase those companies. Budd’s BMW and MINI used a company in Mississauga called MYC Graphics and we talked to them about our plans. The created a rendering and what you see below is the application of the design. mounted in the cabin on aluminum brackets from Planted Technology. We also installed a MOMO Mod 30 wheel which on reflection I found to be slightly small at 320mm. However, the quick fix was to dig out the MOMO Jackie Stewart wheel I had brought with me to Canada back in 1988. But the wheel was older than that, it was a gift from my parents back in 1977 when I turned 21. Now it was a 14” (399mm) wheel but inspired a lot more confidence than the smaller one. I would suggest anyone fitting an aftermarket wheel go no smaller than 330mm but look seriously look at one measuing 350mm. It was around then I started looking at a coilover setup for the car. I had heard lots of good things abot Hot Bits Suspension who had made quite a name for themselves on the Targa Newfoundland event as well as a few locals running BMWs. There was local support for them, so if I needed revalving it would be possible to get that done in the GTA. They worked well and responded well to any adjustments.

The huge MONO decal on the roof was because we now had a pair of MOMO XL seats firmly Next issue we start thinking about an upgrade to full blown race car.

Ultraray Motorsports Oakville, ON www.ultraraymotorsports.com Tel: 1 866-720-9866

Comat Motorsports www.comatmotorsports.com Tel: 905-635-9477

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