Manual Shifting a New MINI Cooper and Countryman Without Paddles – Secret Mode Discovered

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The F66 MINI Cooper and U25 MINI Countryman won’t have shift paddles as standard. Depending how they’re optioned, even some Cooper S and Countryman S won’t have them. And without a traditional gear lever there’s seemingly no way to manually control gears. That is until we discovered a secret mode that fully enables manual control.

The lack of shift paddle will be a big issues for many buying a Cooper or Countryman as a sporty car. While they will be available on JCW models and reportedly on some configurations of the S models, many F66 and U25 will be without them. Luckily with the help from MotoringFile reader Jorge Andrés, we’ve discovered a secret mode that allows the plus and minus rocker button the steering wheel to act as a manual shift control.

If it sounds a bit like a video game, that’s because it feels like one. And getting to this mode isn’t easy. Here’s the sequence; start the car, select D, then pull down and select D/L, then pull down again and select D but this time hold it. And hold it. And hold it. For about 15-20 seconds actually. Finally you’ll see the D turn into a M1 which means it’s now in manual mode.

While we’ve tested this on a new U25 Countryman, we’re told this will also work o the F66 MINI Cooper models as well.

The bigger question from a lot of you will probably why has MINI eliminated the shift paddles from so many models? It’s unclear to us and we’re still getting conflicting reports on what trims and options bring them back in each model. But it’s clear that MINI has limited their availability more so than we’ve seen in the past.

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