It wasn’t simply that the R56 Mini Cooper S Hatch, which hit the road in 2007, was a couple of inches longer than the R53 that came before it. No, there was something else about the new model, too. It ...

The R56 MINI Cooper S, and also the Cooper, comes with a 1.6-liter engine. It's small, but so is the engine bay, so doing any mechanical work vaguely resembles contortionism. People keep complaining ...