Hey all! Excited to be here with you. I'm 42, live in San Diego, and just bought an 07 MCS two weeks ago. My original plan was to race it in SCCA D Street. I've since decided I'm going to prep it for STX and go down that rabbit hole. My first two purchases were a Hotchkis H-Sport Competition sway bar, and Neuspeed RSe05 17 X 7.5 wheels, with Dunlop Direzza DII, 215-45-17. I took it out for it's initial race two Sundays ago and won DS with it. That may be the first and last DS event it's going to do, The next mod I did was to ditch the factory six speaker system. It was truly awful. I replaced the two front speakers with a set of Focal integrated separates. I built a custom bracket for the tweeters and mounted them where the 4" speakers would go. Installed an Alpine media (No CD) head unit and their piggyback amp, running 90W (bridged) to the Focals. The HU 15 watts goes to the stock 6X9s, and then I'm running a powered Bazooka 10" sub (fully removable) in the trunk. It sounds phenomenal...tight and punchy, and a gigantic upgrade. It was a difficult install (I don't do it for a living) but well worth it. I'm happy to share any knowledge I have about any of that stuff. It's a great looking car: Black/Pepper White/Black, with a red interior. 60k miles on it, so it still feels really tight. I'm really impressed with it. It desperately needs an LSD, which may be the next big investment. After I got it set up with company branding (tax write off, anyone?) it was off to the races. It's a little ripper though...I'm sure I'm going to need to budget for speeding tickets. Here are a few pics of the ride: Looking forward to talking shop with you guys.
Welcome to MA. As you have already found out the Mini is a great car to drive and can be made much better with various mods. Start saving money because you are going down a deep hole but it will be fun.