What is the ultimate car?

IT MIGHT NOT BE QUITE WHAT YOU IMAGINE...

It’s grim and wintry, cold and damp. The farms along this Cornish road have been lubricating its surface too. Its bends are fascinating but tricky and bounded by stone hedges so you really don’t want to get it wrong. But in all modesty I don’t expect to, as I’ve been driving this route forever. My own personal Mudschleife.

We all have our benchmark road. It’s not the dream highway of upland sunlight and imagined supercars. It’s the one where we know every twist and dip, every change of surface and on-the-apex drain cover, the exact places that harbour puddles after a shower and autumn leaves after a squall. The road that tests us and our car by a familiar and therefore precise set of metrics. For best results, my road needs a small and quick-reacting car with lots of traction and alive steering. For years, the high-water mark was a Lancia Integrale Evo II, then a naturally aspirated Clio RenaultSport, though a modern Focus ST is pretty handy down there too.

Any more power is pointless. The fun here is in pasting the living daylights out of something modest. Today I have 100bhp and 1,900kg of kerbweight. Slow enough – even if a bit wide for the job. It’s a base-spec Transit.

I had planned this trip weeks ago, and now I fnd events have made me uncharacteristically topical. The most famous fast Transit pedaller has joined the TopGear telly team. Sabine’s speed was absolute, while I am only going relatively fast. Fast relative to other slow things. Driving this Transit demands a binary accelerator – either foot to the foor or else on the brakes. But not much on the brakes. You have to hoard every mph like precious jewels. A little graphic econometer on the dashboard shows scores for anticipation (ie, not braking) and speed (ie, going slowly). My anticipation fower has all its petals intact; my speed score conversely is fat zero.

This style of relatively fast but absolutely slow driving reaches it apogee in holiday-airport rentacars. My early introduction to the genre was a Renault 4 hired out of Marrakech to go over the Atlas Mountains. That was just about all you could rent so I found myself in a convoy of the things, practising slipstreaming on the straights and outbraking into the bends. Later, there was a Peugeot 106 in Andalusia, on the crazy little road that wriggles along the southern border of the Sierra Nevada. It felt like I was rubbing the lettering of the sides of the tyres, and I was having a hoot. Or a Lancia Ypsilon on honeymoon, swerving dementedly across Umbria and making my bride feel so sick our bond of matrimony was under threat before it’d had time to set properly.

Fond memories all (the marriage is intact). Provided they’re willing and spirited, I love cars as feeble as this. But not for breakfast, dinner and tea. For everyday, I want more power than they had. But how much? Modern hot hatches indicate 250bhp isn’t greedy. But we live in an age where anything calling itself a fast car seems to be packing twice that.

Last month I was in a McLaren 675LT. It was perfectly extraordinary. Quite magically connected to my brain, and face-bendingly fast. But pinning the throttle to the foor and winding the engine right out was a joy that never lasted more than a few picoseconds. Then it was always time to back of. A car this fast is wonderful for an occasional intense buzz, but 675bhp is just too much for every day on the road.

It’s no coincidence that my two most enjoyable drives in the past twelvemonth were in a Cayman GT4 and a BMW M2. Smallish, lightish cars, somewhere south of 400bhp. You can use this power. It’s enough to squirt past slower trafc, and it’s enough to give the tyres a bit of exercise when you apply it in a corner. It’s enough to give you the thrill of longitudinal But it’s not too much. You can press the throttle and keep it pressed, hear the revs rise, enjoy the mechanical elements doing their best on your behalf, and you can maintain this for a few whole seconds at a time, savouring it, swirling it around your mouth like a good cofee.

Between a multi-millionaire’s supercar and a builder’s van – which both have their very particular joys – there lies my happy medium.

“I love feeble cars. But not for breakfast, dinner and tea. For everyday, I want more power”