Mini John Cooper Works WRC - Rallye Deutschland 2011

Right let's turn this school girl runabout into a rally monster. 

First thing was to get rid of puny stock spoiler. 

Now to start on the wheel arches. I trimmed down the rear bumper. 

I bought some wheel arches but they were no where near the right shape so I started building them from scratch. Also I reshaped the front vents. 

 

Added some putty to build up the shape of the arches. 

And cut openings for the bonnet vents 

Filled in some details of the vents. 

A few rounds of filling and sanding later. I'm sure other people would have spent more time getting this perfectly smooth but I'm not that kind of person; being overly perfectionist ruins the fun for me. This is good enough. 

Primed. 

 

And started on the underside. 

 

 

 

 

I built the suspension stock for 3 reasons.
1. I have no idea how the rally suspension is different ot the road car
2. If I did rebuild the suspension it woudl likely be quite flimsy
3. Most importantly, I couldn't be bothered. 

A lick of paint on the body. 

The wheels I bought didn't have axels so I added some. I left them long as I was not sure how much I'd need to extend them to fit the wheel arches. 

Now to trim the axels to fit. 

Perfect, turns out I didn't need to extend the wheels at all. 

I should have measured the wheels before but the wider wheels matched the wider arches perfectly. 

I fashioned some new exhaust tips. I'm not going to add them till later as it is a right paint to get the bodywork on and the exhaust tips would make life more difficult. 

I also noticed the rally car does not have a fuel cap, so I sanded that off. 

Now for the interior. The road car interior is so different I wasn't sure if it was worth reusing. In the end I decided to use it so it would help get the door panels aligned. 

Hacked down and built up a base of the boot. 

 

 

The seats are not quite right. They should say Prodrive not Recaro but I didn't have the right decals. I though it would look better with the wrong decals rather than no decals. Also I saw a video of the car with blue seatbelts so that's what I did. Then later on I saw a picture from this specifc rally and they were red. But by that point I thought it would create more of a mess to change them to red. 

The road car pedals were completely wrong so I built some new ones. 

With the interior details added. 

Hacked down the dashboard to match te rally car. 

The dial in front of the driver was close enough and I just added some rough details the the centre console. 

A bit more paint on the bodywork but alas I ran out of white paint. 

The front vents took a good chunk of work to cut out the grill and reshape 

But the vents look good in place. 

Added the rear light. 

That's all for now. I'll get some more white paint and pick this up again in a couple of months time. Next job will be to build a rollcage.