This isn’t voodoo, but if you’ve got a Mini I bet I can make you run to it before you reach the end of this paragraph. Intrigued? You should be, because your car holds a secret, or at least it does if, like me, you don’t read instruction manuals. It’s right under your passenger’s nose, but there’s a good chance you haven’t discovered the Mini’s hidden compartment. Just press the middle of the panel above the glovebox and be amazed!

For those of you still reading, our JCW continues to play a blinder. It’s recently been on its third trackday in just eight weeks, yet the only signs of these regular workouts are the worn tread blocks on the Dunlop run-flats (they’re still legal, though) and a less-than-perfect mpg figure for the month. Even this isn’t too bad, though, as the Mini still returned 22.3mpg on track.

A more supportive seat wouldn’t go amiss in the corners, mind, although this isn’t a complaint you’ll hear from my three-year-old son Harrison, who now has his own Recaro (for road use only, I should add!).

The little fella is growing up, so I recently had to go through the headache of picking a new child seat. The choice is unbelievable, but I eventually found myself drawn to the Monza model from the seat maker whose name is familiar to all petrolheads. After handing over £140 (at Mothercare in my case, although Halfords and www.recaro.com also sell the same seat), Harrison now enjoys a chair with more gizmos than the Jim’ll Fix It throne. It has side-impact protection, 11 adjustments for the headrest, an inflatable head support to aid sleep and even built-in speakers for an iPod! Harrison loves it, which means family Lang now has to go everywhere in the Mini. Why? Because it has Isofix. I won’t bore you with the science, but it’s such a simple system it means you can fix the seat in place in seconds.

Something I couldn’t fix quite so easily was the massive crack that developed in the Mini’s windscreen this month. It was nothing a quick call to the insurance company couldn’t sort, though, and a couple of days later a man turned up in an Autoglass van and fitted a nice new ’screen for us. Speaking to the guys in the office it seems that previous evo long-term Minis have suffered from stone chips and cracks too. Is it just us?