10: Noble M12 GT0-3R 170mph
"In a world obsessed with image, you can’t beat a Porsche. But in a world obsessed with time, a Porsche is a library. A TVR is the internet. And the Noble is broadband"
9: Aston Martin V8 Vantage 175mph. £51,500.
"Thanks to heavy steering, heavy brakes and a heavy six-speed manual gearbox, they’ve made the syllabub-light body feel like a meat pie. The 911 is for nancy boy racing drivers. The Aston’s for gentleman thugs"
8: Chevrolet Corvette C6 180mph. £52,595.
"This car has a head-up display, just like you get in an F-16 fighter. It’s fantastic. Whole bus queues are hidden behind the digital speed read-out, which is going to make for some wonderful insurance claims"
7: Vauxhall Monaro VXR 185mph. £36,995.
"Think of it as an Aussie from the outback. Maybe he can’t quote Shakespeare. Maybe he’s never heard of Terence Conran. But he can smash all the teeth clean out of your mouth with a single punch. That's the Monaro"
6: Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder 190mph. £115,000.
"So why, you may be wondering, am I so fond of this car? I’ll tell you why. Because it’s got orange seats. And because it is so pretty. And because when you go above 3500rpm it makes a noise like a punctured sumo wrestler. And because you sit so far forwards you feel like you’re on the nose of some giant, snarling power-crazed animal"
5: Lamborghini Gallardo 192mph. £115,000
"It changes direction like a fly, grips like a barnacle and goes like a jet fighter on combat power. At one point I saw 175mph on the clock and there was plenty more where that came from"
4: BMW M5 204mph. £61,760.
"Eventually I relocated Bob Seger but unfortunately I was approaching a roundabout and the sat nav woman had decided I was an idiot. So she told me to go straight over and then repeated herself and then repeated it again. And by the time she’d shut up Bob had been replaced with a miserable sounding girl called Dildo"
3: Porsche Carrera GT 205mph. £330,000
"I’ve been in some pretty fast machinery over the years, but nothing prepared me for the neck-snapping, spleen-bursting, hammer blow explosion of power that came the first time I floored the Carrera’s throttle"
2: Koenigsegg CCX 250mph £368,700
"The noise is hard to explain. There’s a lot of it, and in some ways it sounds like an amplified version of that sound you make when you hit the brakes at 193mph. A sort of AAAAAAAARGH"
1: Bugatti Veyron 16.4 253mph £810,345
"On a recent drive across Europe I desperately wanted to reach the top speed but I ran out of road when the needle hit 240mph. Where, astonishingly, it felt planted. Totally and utterly rock steady. It felt sublime.
Not quiet, though. The engine sounds like Victorian plumbing — it looks like Victorian plumbing as well, to be honest — and the roar from the tyres was biblical. But it still felt brilliant. Utterly, stunningly, mind blowingly, jaw droppingly brilliant"
What would your top ten be?
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