RICHARD PORTER

As you might expect, Porter’s choices range from the sublime to the ridiculous

OH BLOODY HELL, YOU MUST BE THINKING, WHY are car journalists always eulogising Porsche 911s? Well, the thing is, Porsche 911s are really, really good. And the 997 Gen 2 GT3 RS, for me, is the best of the lot.

For starters, it’s the 997 shape, the last of the petite 911s. Subsequent models are hardly massive but they’re not as compact as this and you feel it as soon as you get in. It’s usefully small. It fits around you. And it just gets better from there. The quality of the steering, the crispness of the gearchange, the power and range and sound of the engine. The way it digs into corners but has a slight edge that keeps you on your toes while reminding you that there’s always more to learn about what it does and when.

Personally, I’d want to make a never-sold Touring spec by deleting the rear wing. After all, how much downforce do you actually need on the road? I’d strip off the stickers too, and find a way to fit back seats so my kids could come along. This might sound like sacrilege but I’m just imagining ways to make it as useable as possible. Because if I had one of these, I don’t think I’d ever want to drive anything else.

The first time I drove the 458 Speciale was on evo Car of the Year in 2014, jumping straight into the seat vacated seconds earlier by smooth-headed lunatic Marino Franchitti. He’d even left the engine running for me. This might be why it took half an hour of howling across the damp roads of the Scottish Borders, including a couple of slightly hairy dab-of-oppo moments, before I noticed that Marino, the nutcase, had got all the stability systems switched off. I’d have never dared mute the computers on my first drive in a 597 horsepower car on slithery roads, but it’s a mark of the Ferrari’s fundamentally sorted chassis that it simply wasn’t an issue.

And when you know the basics are so good you can really enjoy the whole package: the steering, the gearchanges, the engine. Oh God, that engine. I’ve not driven the 488 Pista which is why, under Perfect 10 rules, I couldn’t include it here even if I wanted to. But honestly, how could a turbocharged V8 beat the unforced gem in this? It’s one of greatest engines of all time, in a car that foiled Marino Franchitti’s attempts to kill me. For these, and many other reasons, I’ll always love it.

Despite putting high-powered heroes in the top two slots, I often find my happy place in lower-powered cars where you can use more of the performance on more roads more of the time. Which is where the Elise comes in, and specifically the entrylevel Series 2 Elise with the 1.8-litre Toyota engine. We had