I drove a Mini Cooper S around as I was debating an extra car to purchase while the VX was at Aamco, and it was really really fun driving that car around!!!!! And my friend who let me borrow it wanted only $13k for it and it was hard to pass up, but the moment I test drove a RX-8 I feel in love with the smoothness of the rotary engine, and it handled far better than the Mini Cooper S (something pretty hard to do). If I had purchased the Cooper S I would've black it out completely (what is the slang term "murdered it") and purchased a body kit for it, maybe something like this:
http://www.bodykits.com/249/286/672/...t-p-26623.html
But I have liked the RX-8 so much that it gets the garage most of the time. I have put maybe 4k miles on it in 8 months.