The best track cars you can buy

Welcome to Top Gear magazine's round up of The Best Cars In The World. That might seem a trite observation, but after much deliberation, haranguing and three bouts of raised voices, the vehicles represent the cars that TG magazine would happily recommend to family and best friends, without reservation.

Any of these cars - within their brief - are the best at what they do. They are the TG benchmarks, the class leaders.

There are three loose price points to scale our ambition: an attainable version, an aspiration and a dream.

So, allow us to guide you through the cars you should consider before all else. Today, it's the turn of the road-legal trackday stars...

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There is a point, when you're being lapped for the third time in seven minutes, that the hope of redemption starts to fade and thoughts inevitably turn to childish revenge.

It's a lonely place, where whatever weeping shell of ego you have left has assumed the metaphorical foetal position and is refusing to engage, even given rock-solid racing-driver excuses such as having less than a third of the power and one fewer cylinder than the car that's doing the lapping, and that said car is piloted by a track-dialled automaton.

Pictures: Rowan Horncastle

This feature was originally published in the September 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine

Nevertheless, summoning up the last black reserves of sheer bloody-mindedness, I decide that the Caterham 160 should not become a mere rolling roadblock yet again, and I get creative. This involves becoming suicidally committed - albeit only as suicidally committed as 80bhp and a live rear axle will allow. But, then again, you can't be slightly pregnant or a bit dead, and so as The Stig looms in my mirror (or would do, the rear-view mirror having fallen off) in a black BAC Mono, I, bluntly, drive incredibly dangerously in the hope he won't want to overtake someone who is scant moments away from exploring the taste sensation that is Armco.

We are at the glorious Cadwell Park in Lincolnshire, whose situation within the fold of a pretty little valley provides ample opportunity for me to display my uncanny knack for appearing utterly unskilled. Down a steep hill into what they call Mansfield - a sharp left-hander - I am in fifth and accelerating past 80mph. This is the wrong gear to be in, at the wrong speed, at the wrong part of the circuit. Considering that the 160 runs 155-section, 65-profile Avons on 14-inch steel wheels and drum brakes at the back, this is probably also the wrong car to be in.

Not sure why I'm slightly surprised by the Caterham's lack of ABS, but The Stig certainly is, and as the Mono is engulfed in an acrid plume of off-white tyre smoke, I slam the manual gearbox into third, unceremoniously lob the 160 at the corner and - very nearly - soil myself. The Caterham lurches into a groaning parabola of understeer quickly translated into a full oh-God-I've-run-out-of-lock slide only mitigated by the open differential and absolute lack of meaningful power.

The only reason I haven't crashed is the fact that with under 500kg to sort out, there's little Caterham-shaped inertia to carry. There is, however, Pyrrhic victory: The Stig has been unable to overtake, though I did see him through the passenger-side opening halfway around the corner, and if it's possible for a helmet to exude disapproval, that blank white visage is dripping with it.

I am beating The Stig. OK, so it's more a case of slewing around every corner in varying states of dynamic distress and weaving drunkenly on anything resembling a straight, but he's still behind and I'm in front. Albeit also sometimes on the grass. Unfortunately, it doesn't last. Eventually we get to a wider part of the track, and I hear the sharp clack of the Mono engaging a lower gear, and flinch as the BAC rips the air apart two feet to my right. A brief view of cobwebbed rear suspension and centrally mounted exhaust, and the Mono is cresting a brow. By the time I've urged the Caterham over it, the BAC is gone.

And yet, for all the Caterham's dynamic shortcomings, I've been laughing. Because this is what buying a track-day car is about. Driving as hard as possible without putting other people at risk, pushing a car's - and your - limits, in relative safety. Of course, the Caterham, at £17,995 built, is at the expensive but lower end of the off-the-peg track-day market.

After all, just under 18 grand for what amounts to a sunny-days toy is not for the faint-hearted. And yet it offers a stark and rather pointed introduction to how to drive a performance car well. Modest power, modest brakes, not one byte of electronic help, rear-wheel drive and decent steering mean that the things you learn in a 160 - being smooth, carrying speed - are easily translated into something with a little more bite.

Which is where the Ariel Atom 3.5R comes in. Because this thing has enough bite to chew through most cars, track-day or not. It's the familiar Atom scaffold banana, equipped with 350bhp from a supercharged 2.0-litre Honda four-cylinder. It weighs roughly 550kg. It has wings and sidepods, and a Sadev pneumatic sequential paddle 'box.

It has a rather brilliant locking differential, and enough grunt through the rev range to satisfy even The Stig. Certainly he circulated around Cadwell at a speed that would give a motorcyclist pause, the Atom's supercharger whining like a turbine's starter motor, exhaust shotgunning backfires and spitting flame on downchanges.

Then again, it's remarkably easy to drive, too. Yes, it feels strange and exotic, and you need to familiarise yourself with the 'box, but once you've got used to giving the clutch a quick blip at slow speeds to smooth things out, and driven it hard enough to change down three gears off a big straight, you'll realise it's nothing short of spectacular.

The acceleration is best described as "unyielding" up to about 130mph, where it noticeably starts to tail off. Though at that speed, incoming airflow will be trying to tug your head off. Atom reckons 0-62 in something like two and a half seconds, and it'll do that if you can find the traction.

We found the traction. In fact, we found traction in every part of Cadwell's endlessly enervating dips and crests, felt the Atom dig at the road surface, yanking itself around corners like it had spikes in the tyres. I exited one long right-hander with the left side of my face unnaturally bloated, such was the fury of the centrifuge.

If you give it a bootful at the wrong moment, it'll kick sideways, but this 3.5R is more benign than Atoms of old - there's more communication and signposting when it's about to slide, and it moves nicely on beautiful Öhlins damping - not sloppy or imprecise, but more supple and friendly than you'd imagine.

It does lift a bit and wheelspin hard when you go over serious crests - someone really should have warned me about full throttle over Cadwell's The Mountain before I did it - but even when in a big flick-flack fast right-left, I never felt less than secure.

The steering is beautiful, the brakes phenomenal and the experience sublime. Looks completely crackers, too. In fact, for about basic £54k (the sequential 'box costs a bit more), there really is nothing like the Atom's mix of easy-going violent potential. It's like having a pet tiger.

The Briggs Automotive Company Mono is something else entirely. Less of a car you take to a track than a car that's allowed circuit-day release. First up, it's a single-seater, unlike any car you've driven on the road, and the wheel has myriad buttons, which is both fascinating and confusing. You sit with your feet level with your sternum, stretched out and laid back.

It feels like the kind of thing you see on the telly. It feels special. You can drive the BAC on the road and it works very nicely. But to do so solely would miss the point, because what a Mono appreciates, more than anything, is being absolutely, resolutely hammered.

It's naturally aspirated and revs hard and long, and though it has around 70bhp less than the Atom and weighs about the same, it doesn't feel like it. It vibrates like a mad thing, the pneumatic paddle 'box changes DSG fast, and it certainly does not want to slide around in a laptime-consuming fashion. It just wants to go very, very fast. No showboating, no mess. This is a car for the neat. The experienced. The committed.

It looks like it too. Face it, if you're going to turn up to a track day in £95k of Mono, you'd best be pretty handy, or people will take great delight in taking the rise. But get it right, and this thing changes direction like one of those small, darty fish, spearing away in a massless fashion, an instant reaction to a roll of the wrists. It's quicker to react than even the Atom, so you can correct mistakes even faster, but equally swift to punish should you get lazy. And the brakes, well, the brakes are something else.

This car is fitted with the £8,450 carbon-ceramic option, and they don't so much slow it down as punch the Mono to a halt. The Ariel is more fun and forgiving - and quite probably faster for most people - but the Mono takes the track-day ethos to the next level. The seductive stratum after that is full-blown racing - at which point, the BAC's £95k starts to look eminently reasonable.

The strange thing is that, for cars with such similar genesis and attitude, these three couldn't be more different. The Caterham is like a track car with stabilisers - you can't get too far into trouble, but it's lots of fun for that. The Atom is the brilliant, only slightly terrifying track car that you can share, and the Mono is basically a tempt for single-seater racing. But they have one thing in common: you'll get out of every single one wearing a grin that links your ears. I guarantee it.