Weekend Wrap Up pt 1-Cooper Clinic

First and foremost we would like to thank our Friends at BMW & MINI Cooper Specialists for hosting a VERY informative Car Clinic this past weekend.  Jesus Govea and his Family worked hard to get the shop looking fantastic, keeping the lobby and refreshments cold, grilling the Hot Dogs HOT and sharing a lot of insight on the cars we love.  The BMW & MC Specialists were also very generous with the Oil Change and Air Induction service Raffles. Congrats to the Winners!

We also need to thank our site sponsor Go Badges for their generous donation of badges and a grill badge holder. And by the way, the epMINI’s Go Badge should be ready for sale and ship by Thursday, June 30th.  We will be ordering a couple for our MINIs so you all can check them out at the next rally.  And Don’t forget to use the 10% discount code: epminis at the GoBadges site for ALL your purchases.  GOBADGES Site Link HERE

Whether you have an older MINI with with 80,000 miles or a newer MINI with 8,000 miles, you should go and talk to Jesus and the staff at BMW & MINI Cooper Specialists to find out what kind of services can keep your MINI quick and clean.  The BG product demos offered up some very eye-opening facts about the 15,000 mile factory Maintenance Schedule. In all honesty, I’ve always thought (argued) that running your MINI on the same oil for 15,000 miles in this climate is absolutely insane!  The BG Product rep offered physical demonstrations of seized engines and a slide show of low mileage, sludged up engine issues that are easily avoidable with a little bit of extra maintenance between the factory scheduled ones.  And then of course, there was the Air Induction System cleaning. Jesus and his team used the BG products to clean the air induction system of a Clubman with about 13,000 miles on it.  Not only did the system blow out all sorts of carbon buildup, but when it was all said and done, the Clubman sounded better, ran smoother, and returned better MPGs post air induction service. We’ll be scheduling one of those for the Countryman sooner rather than later.

I’m no wrencher by any means and I know I’ve lost some of the details on the services offered at the clinic, so go by the shop and ask them about what service might be right for you!

Weekend Wrap Up pt 2-Coffee and Cars + Autocross

Was it HOT on Sunday?  YUP!  But we still put a good group of MINI’s together to meet up with the Coffee and Cars group at the Starbucks off of Transmountain.  There were multiple flavors of Hondas, Beemers, Suburu’s and my favorite, the DUBS.  (VW’s).  They all gave the MINIs a warm welcome and were all happy to see a good group of MINI’s make the meet. Way to go epMINIs!

After a “Coffee and Cars” breakfast, we took our epMINIs group across the street to check out the Autocross action at Cohen Stadium. Yeah it was HOT but 3 of our epMINIs folks (Including Mrs. epMINIs) did some ride alongs with the SCCA racers and had a BLAST in the process!  An autocross is more about handling and less about horsepower.  Any MINI folks out there ready for the challenge?  The Sports Car Club of America is anxious to get us out on their next Autocross event!

Site Updates

Over to the right of the page you will notice under the “et al.” heading a new link to our Flickr PhotoStream.  epMINIs will be posting its photos over in there from time to time.  You’ll also see a preview of new photos at the bottom right of that same column.  Go check out this past weekend’s events!

We’ll be looking to get together again later in July or August.  We want to do a little day trip/picnic up north a bit. We want to be sure the area’s are open and the roads are clear first. Dates and details to follow.