I didn’t really get the ad either, but the put-down was clear.

I think part of the problem stems from the name “mini john cooper works”. In an ironic twist the name doesn’t work.

I get the Mini part, and the Cooper part, the Works is a tacky addon, but the John just befuddles me to no end.

A little history, the car originally called the Austin Mini or the Rover Mini was truncated to the Mini. Then John Cooper started racing them and put a larger engine in them. The Mini soon became known as the Mini Cooper because only the Cooper editions were in high demand.

Flash forward to the new (BMW) ‘Mini Cooper’, since the ‘Cooper’ which used to distinguish the faster versions is now the name of the base model, and they already added an S to the supercharged version, I guess they had to add ‘works’ onto the racy model.

I still don’t understand the point of adding ‘John’, it is over-thought out and just seems to nail the lid on the whole ‘BMW don’t get how British the mini is supposed to be’ thing. The analogue to this would be the marketing of Von Dutch to mall-going lolcats.