Top 5 Best Hardcore Sports Cars 2018

Welcome to true-blue petrolhead territory. This is where incredible outright grip and pace, vivid driver engagement and thrill, supreme handling poise and track-day-ready specification and purpose all abide. You’ll like it here.

The cars we’re saluting are genuine immortals of speed and excitement. Some of them are so exciting, in fact, that they don’t really belong on the road at all — although all are road-legal with numberplates. But all are cars you’d be in the market for if you wanted a money-no-object track-day tool to enjoy through the summer months — and something you could drive home in afterwards.

Here, we rank both current production machines and those that have gone off sale but have yet to be replaced, making them an enduringly valid dynamic benchmark for the class even though they’re not in production.

That’s because sports cars as special as these are rare – and to chart 10 without counting those that are technically defunct would be to deny some amazing driver’s cars the recognition they’re undoubtedly due.

1. Porsche 911 GT3

The supreme hardcore focus, track-day hardiness, handling brilliance, driver involvement and performance value of the Porsche 911 GT3make it a car that absolutely demands the highest recognition we can give. It has become the default answer to any number of questions a newly inducted petrolhead might ask about which car they should buy to maximise return on investment for speed, excitement and driver reward. The only fly in the ointment is that, these days, everyone knows it — and so GT3s have become highly sought after.

This isn’t a car that advertises its brilliance particularly loudly on paper. The car’s 493bhp 4.0-litre flat-six makes it look a bit outgunned in this company, and even in Porsche’s own model range there are several 911s with greater claimed power and outright accelerative performance. But no rival has the GT3’s blend of pace, grip, balance and usefully positioned weight; none has the all-round dynamic precision and outstanding controllability needed at once to set blistering laptimes and set your imagination racing on track. And few seem as well suited to road use once the pitlane has closed

Through three generations and as many mid-cycle revisions, the GT3 has got better and better since the very first one appeared in 1999. Counting some very closely related GT3 derivative offshoots, it has won Autocar’s annual Britain’s Best Driver’s Car contest four times. Porsche 911s of various types have won it seven times. For the record, no other sports car in three decades of competition has won it more than twice.

2. Ferrari 458 Speciale

When car enthusiasm is outlawed, the mid-engined supercar is consigned to history and its obituary is written, the track-tailored Ferrari 458 Speciale might just be recognised as the greatest and most exciting example ever built.

It remains in our hardcore sports cars top 10 because, while the 458 Italia on which it was basedhas long since been replaced by Maranello’s 488 GTB, the Speciale’s direct replacement has yet to appear. And even when that successor does materialise, there are those at Autocar HQ who simply can’t fathom how it’ll be a better driver’s car than this.

The car was introduced at the 2013 Frankfurt motor show, having had its 4.5-litre V8 massaged to the tune of 597bhp at a stratospheric 9000rpm, its twin-clutch gearbox sharpened up on shift time, its kerbweight slimmed down by 90kg in all, its suspension retuned, its brakes uprated, its steering quickened and its aerodynamics honed. All onwards and upwards from the baseline 458 Italia, which wasn’t a car to be sniffed at. And what results those revisions yielded.

The Speciale’s pin-sharp handling was awe-inspiring, and its handling poise and adjustability so spell-binding as to be capable of keeping you under its power, lap by lap, almost interminably. And it could be that way whether you had the car’s electronic aids on or off. The car’s controls felt more faithful, too, than a regular 458’s, while the car’s screaming engine was a fitting farewell to the Ferrari atmospheric V8.

3. Porsche 911 GT2 RS

This is where the world’s best-loved sports car gets a bit silly. There has never been a faster or more powerful 911 than the 690bhp, 211mph GT2 RS. This uber-911 seeks to combine the involving track focus of the GT3 RS with a level of torque and sheer brute force performance that even a 911 Turbo S couldn’t equal, with the latter channelled through one driven axle rather than two. It’s quite a mission statement — and, if only by Porsche’s own high standards, it’s not entirely successfully delivered upon.

But such a tiny detail needn’t necessarily come between any GT2 RS owner and the appreciation of what remains a staggeringly compelling driver’s car, because the GT2 RS is remarkably good at keeping its ridiculousness largely in check most of the time, unleashing it only when you want it to. The car uses 21in rear wheels and 325-section tyres to transmit its venom to the Tarmac. It has carbon-ceramic brakes as standard and a suspension set-up even more specialised than that of a GT3 RS.

And yet, unlike almost any other 911 GT2 there has ever been, it knows how to behave itself when the occasion calls for it. At other times? It’s ballistic; not without turbo lag (how could it be?) but still remarkably responsive and linear, and as fast as a hypercar in full cry. It’s also approachable and obedient on a track, for the most part. It doesn’t feel like it’s hardwired into your synapses like a GT3 and doesn’t involve to quite the same extent. Even so, there’s nothing else quite like it.

4. McLaren 675 LT

Ranking here because, just like the Ferrari 458 Speciale, it has yet to be directly replaced, the McLaren 675 ‘Longtail’ was a coming of age for its British originator in more ways than one. It was the first of McLaren’s supercars to begin to show us evidence of a key realisation from Woking: that keen drivers ultimately care at least as much about how they’re going fast as how fast they can ultimately go.

Having ticked the second box pretty emphatically with the P1 hypercar, McLaren catered more to the first with the 675 LT — and quite successfully so. The firm found an extra 25bhp for the car’s 3.8-litre turbo V8 engine in addition to 650S trim, but added bodywork that created 40% more downforce, saved 100kg of kerb weight, stiffened the car’s suspension and quickened its steering rack.

But, above all else, it retuned the 650S’s torque vectoring system and electronic aids to allow its handling to come alive more readily on circuit, and rebalanced its grip levels to give it the handling agility, poise and adjustability of a really immersive mid-engined driver’s car. It’s a monster of track machine, too: thoroughly challenging and rampantly fast. But, perhaps most importantly of all, this was the first of McLaren’s road car crop that could also be really good fun.

5. Lamborghini Huracán Performante

Having until quite recently been the fastest production car in history to lap the Nürburgring Nordschleife circuit, the Lamborghini Huracán Performante is also the fastest car we’ve ever timed around our benchmark dry handling circuit around which every performance car that’s subject to a full Autocar road test is driven.

That makes the 630bhp, extra-lightweight, four-wheel drive Lambo quicker, corner by corner, than a McLaren P1, a Porsche 918 Spyder and a Bugatti Veyron Supersport; that's proof of how much grip, incisiveness, poise and precision Sant’Agata has engineering into a Huracán chassis, which wasn’t class-leading in any of those respects in standard form. Very little will prepare you for the baleful, red-blooded howl of this car’s naturally aspirated V10 engine as it rips past 8000rpm, or the savagery of every upshift of its twin-clutch gearbox.

In an era of turbocharged opponents, the Huracán’s rapier-sharp engine really is to be embraced and savoured. But, in this Huracán, the handling balance and confidence you’ll unearth once the car’s incredible Pirelli Trofeo R tyres are warmed up is of almost equal brilliance as the powertrain.

The Huracán has almost unrivalled supercar presence and sense of occasion, not to mention all that bleeding soul. As an object of desire, its appeal is multifaceted; you won’t find better-looking carbonfibre anywhere else in the world. As a driver’s car, it only lacks that last degree of throttle-on poise and interactivity of the best of its rivals.