I would never have guessed that so many things could go wrong with getting tires, but here is my tire story.

A week after I ordered my car, I ordered snow tires and wheels from Tire Rack. (Tire Rack is awesome... amazing customer service) They were supposed to arrive in early November, but they got back ordered. So I changed the wheels and tires to something else.

The new order arrived right away!
Unfortunately, the tires are directional, and three were mounted in one direction and one in the other. Tire Rack was very accomodating, and they told me to take the tire someplace local to have it remounted and balanced. Tire Rack would reimburse me. So I took the tires off to a local place to have them remounted.

About a week after that I was putting a protective coating on the wheels, and I noticed a huge gouge out of one of the wheels!
It was obviously the one that had been remounted because the sticker holding the centering ring into the wheel was punctured.
Again everyone was very nice, and the tire place bought me a new wheel from Tire Rack.

Meanwhile Tire Rack did apply a credit to the original tire rebalancing, only they applied it to my partner, Romo's credit card since Romo had also just ordered a new tire package. No big deal, just one more odd thing in my tire story.

The new wheel arrived on a Thursday, and I was picking up my Mini on a Saturday. So I went back to the same local tire place first thing on Friday morning to have the tire, once again, remounted. When I went to pick up the wheel this time, I paid more attention... This time the place lost the centering ring! A tire place.... didn't even know what a centering ring was! Even though I caught the mistake immediately, they couldn't find the centering ring! Even though I ordered snow tires 6 weeks before my mini was supposed to arrive, I was only going to be able to put two of them on the car when I went to pick it up. A four hour drive through the mountains in my new car in late November

I called Alex at Tire Rack, and I left a message explaining what had happened. He could not have been nicer. He sent me a new centering ring immediately.

I picked up my car, put two snow tires on it, and had no bad weather.
Very happy with the Mini!!!

So the centering ring arrived, and I went to put the snow tires on the front yesterday. No clip for the new centering ring.

Once again Tire Rack could not be more responsive, and they are overnighting the new clip for me.

Hopefully this is the end of my tire story!
I could not be happier with Alex and with Tire Rack....don't think I'll be going back to my local tire place.

 

Interesting luck you have had there, glad to hear things have finally worked out. At least you were not confronted with a blizzard going through the mountains!
I just finished removing the summer wheels/tires and mounted the winter set.
We have had great weather around these parts, but thought it better not to push my luck. I suspect I will miss the great response of my summer tires, but this year they were on a full month longer than last fall.
Completely off topic, but now that you've had your car for a wee bit, how do you like the brushed alloy dash? That dash is very rare here, I have never touched it, and only seen it on one car at the local dealer through the window of a locked car on the service lot...
Thinking of ordering brushed alloy for the next MINI...

 

Hey mansize,
Thanks for the reply.
I really like the look of the brushed alloy dash. I love that it is actual metal vs. plastic. It is fairly rough to the touch, and I suspect it will be hard to clean for that reason. It would snag most cloths I think. I'll have to see how it goes over time, but I'm really really happy with the look.

 

Actual metal, that's good stuff.
How about the door rings, I hear they are not brushed alloy, but similar to the fluid silver that is standard on the MC - do they look good, and not out of place?

 

The door rings are the fluid silver color. The cushy part of the door hand is the color line (mine is dark gray), and the part next to that is brushed alloy. So the only part of the door that is brushed alloy is just about 6" towards the center of the door. I think it looks really nice together. In the photo you can't really see the difference. Up close, you can obviously tell that they aren't the same material, but they look nice together.

 

Awesome, thanks for the pic.
Nice car!