BBR PowerGrip Suspension

Our Suspension Conversion is extremely effective and really works, its our view that the original spring rates and shock absorber bump and rebound settings are about right for road use! The real cornering problem is understeer! its savage! Any real attempt to power out of moderately tight corners the front end losses grip and your into terminal understeer! Now you can throw all the springs and shocks at the Mini you like, your not going to loose that basic understeer. As its a basic feature of all front wheel drive vehicles, and guess what? Its purposely built in by all manufactures.

Understeer is built in for a reason (safety) which is this, the bad to average driver, male or female, when going in too quick, can cope with turning more steering into the corner and lifting off the throttle, all very cozy and safe, but no good to you, you need grip!

Now oversteer the reverse, is a different story! If a car oversteers the rear end comes out, it can be gradual or virtually instant which is not user friendly. A good example is a near flat rear tyre, you turn in, and the rear end comes out frightening the wits out of the driver! we've all had that!

So how do you improve mini front end grip? the answer is simple, re-jig the front suspension to give what's called neutral handling we call this our "PowerGrip handling kit". With decades of circuit set up experience BBR know a thing or two about suspension, which we have applied to the Mini range. Remember we use the original suspension rates so you don't have to put up with a unnecessary bumpy ride. At BBR we just change the way the suspension works on the road! We are proud of what we have achieved and along the way developing our handling kit we discovered a basic mechanical fault in the original suspension set up? which when corrected virtually eliminates that odd n/s to o/s dipping under heavy breaking that all Mini's suffer from!

So to summarize, BBR set out to modify the Mini suspension to be effective for you the hard driver. Our suspension will allow you to power out of turns, with progressive to full throttle, without the front end losing grip. Giving you "neutral" handling which when pushed really hard turns into mild progressive oversteer, you just keep on accelerating and the rear end pulls back in! Its great fun and a must for track days. We also advise ditching those daft, no feel run flat front tyres for Goodyear F1's, the difference is just amazing, with far lighter responsive steering.

A graphic example how BBR PowerGrip suspension works over other Cooper S's was at a recent BBC tv Top Gear shoot out (Which is to be UK screened in November 2003). The looney presenters were pitching the Cooper's flat out into a sharp but fast right hand corner, these Cooper's were bogging down with terminal understeer, the drivers having to lift off to regain front end grip. The BBR car was pitched in even faster, the front end gripped allowing the driver to accelerate hard out of the corner leaving other Cooper's for dead. Both presenters were stunned by the grip and handling of BBR car, and were further amazed to be told our car had standard spring and shocks!

 Quote evo magazine November 2003:

"The BBR car is the pointiest, most throttle steerable Mini here," (11 other converted Mini's on test) " but feels benign enough" Well of course it was, it had BBR PowerGrip suspension.