Here are nine of Top Gear's Speed Week heroes

Affectionately nicknamed the “Supertranny”, what looks like a plumber’s best friend is actually a sports car’s worst nightmare. Those fat tyres are the giveaway that it runs a 200bhp 3.2-litre five-pot diesel and smuggles hot-hatch performance.

With 1,800bhp, a top speed of 218mph (available from a height of just 10cm) and a £7m pricetag, sorting the insurance for this one was interesting. But its ability to regress the entire TG staff into giggling cameraphone-waving children was second to none.

It takes quite something to overshadow a very orange Pagani Zonda F on the Stelvio Pass, but the slightly less orange Veyron SS did just that in 2011. Described as “mind-scrabbling”, it ruined all who drove it. Nothing has seemed remotely fast since.

A unique ability to melt its driver’s bowels within four seconds of setting off, marked out the ’Wang. It looked like the DeltaWing, but was really a Westfield with a narrow front track and some fibreglass bits stuck on. Handling best described as “ruddy terrifying”.

Splicing a Honda HF 2620 ride-on mower with a 109bhp Honda VTR FireStorm motorbike engine to create a 130mph, 0–62mph in four seconds grass cutter, seemed like a good idea at the time. Still does, to be fair. Stig’s lawn has never looked so good.

Never before has a car been more out of place than this NASCAR, last seen disturbing the peace in the Austrian countryside. For sheer volume and on-demand burnouts, its legendary status is assured. For going around corners... not so much.

A Caparo T1 “doesn’t accelerate so much as compress time and vaporise distance.” So said a slightly squished Jason Barlow in 2007. It was also a pig to pull away in and to drive neatly on the road. A fish out of water, but a tasty one nonetheless.

Most cars come with a handbook, the P1 GTR comes with a Bruno Senna. At least the one that showed up to the RBR in 2015 did. But then this is a £2m 986bhp firework capable of keeping an F1 car honest. Hats off to Mr Marriage for getting within a second of Senna.

RWD, rear-engined, 320bhp and an insanely short wheelbase sounds like page one of the handbook How to Spin into the Nearest Concrete Barrier. It is, in fact, the spec of the one-off Twin’Run concept that Renault let us drive in 2013. The fools.