Speed Week 2016: the final five

Consensus – when dealing with a stroppy group of Top Gear men-children and an eye-wateringly shiny toybox of the best fast cars on the planet – is understandably fairly hard to come by. 

But without sounding like the worst kind of magnolia cop-out this side of a YouTube product “review”, the phalanx of brilliance that showed up to the Red Bull Ring didn’t actually contain many obvious turnips. Yes, the Fiat 124 felt a little flat-footed at the track, and the M4 GTS provided such a spectacular mismatch of orange-accented mouth versus trousers we suspected it might have some sort of mechanical flu, but generally, every single car that turned up had someone making a decent case for why it should win.

Images: John Wycherley

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Trouble is, harshly winnowing the full list of 18 into a shortlist of 16 just didn’t feel like we were doing our job properly, and while there are many very good reasons for not wanting to be Chris Harris, this is a big one: having a casting vote on what goes through comes with the kind of pressure that would give any right-thinking individual a nosebleed. It’s like choosing which finger you’d least like to lose. But hard decisions had to be made, and made they were. In no particular order, the cars that impressed us most over the past few days are: Ferrari 488, McLaren 675LT Spider, VW Golf Clubsport S, Alfa Romeo Giulia QV and Porsche 911R. Serious stuff. 

For a final showdown, we take them back onto the road, where there are hedges, ditches, traffic and serious-faced police officers, to get a better idea of what they might be like in the real world, together, on the same roads on the same day. After all, we’re looking for a performance car, not a track special (hence why the track-only Vulcan isn’t present), and although the circuit allows us to push these kinds of cars to the limit in relative safety, what works on the smooth tarmac of a race track might not make the same impression when there are bumps, potholes and a distinct lack of gravel traps. Reality bites, and Austrian roads have plenty of teeth. 

As for a venue, it didn’t take long to decide where we’d be heading. The Rechberg Hillclimb is an hour or so away from the Red Bull Ring, an official round of the FIA European Hillclimb Championship, it also happens to be one of Austria’s most beloved motorsports events. It’s not hard to see why; located between the sleepy villages of Tulwitz and Rechbergdorf, the Rechberg Rennen on the B64 is five kilometres of strange little perfection annually and briefly populated by hundreds of racing cars of every stripe, from monstrous single-seaters to classics to Time Attack prototypes. A few endless corners, a big hill and several wince-inducing drops – the majority of whose drama develops in a spectator-friendly natural amphitheatre of a pretty little valley – means that this is the perfect place to see if our culled group of fast things is up to the job. And which one might be just that little bit more equal than the others.

The drive over is instructive in itself. It’s an odd little convoy, the Ferrari and McLaren low-slung and showy, the Porsche, Golf and Giulia less visually insistent, but no less handsome. The Alfa no longer looks fat – it managed to look a little bit doughy on the track, especially in white – the Golf as sharp and clean as a hatchback gets. The 911R, for all its showboating stripes, just looks like a well-specced 911, and for that it’s hard not to love it. And all five are docile and easy to drive. No chuntering paddleshifts, no switchblade controls. Yes, you might have to take extra time pulling out of spaces in the supercars, and no, they’re not the easiest to navigate through towns, but gone are the days that this amount of speedy potential means that you couldn’t commute in any of them. But that’s not what we’re here for, so we’ll begin with the most approachable of the group.

The Golf Clubsport S is, bluntly, one of my favourite cars of the year. It’s manic, playful, exciting, energetic and a bit mad. Most of the things you wouldn’t expect from a VW Golf. It’s more fun than the ballistic – and determinedly AWD – Golf R, can be flung around a track providing lift-off and momentum-induced oversteer, and yet when you’re being neat, provides the kind of rapid security that means you can really, really annoy people with much more expensive sports cars. On a real road, it’s hard to fault; the re-tuned XDS front differential means that it pinions itself into a hairpin and simply refuses to let go. Front-wheel-drive understeer? It’s virtually non-existent. Decent soundtrack? Hardworking engine? Satisfying manual ’box? Tick, tick and tick. I’d be tempted by the straight Clubsport simply because it reinstates the back seats for über-Golf practicality, but as a hatch that deals with 99 per cent of what you need from a one-size-fits-all fast thing, it cannot be beaten. Unfortunately, we’re not looking for such democratic delivery. The Golf, for all its brilliance, isn’t the best car here.

The Ferrari – undoubtedly – feels like the best car. Until you drive the McLaren, which then becomes the best car. At which point you try to chase Ollie Marriage in the Ferrari, and get a bit dizzy. Drivable they may be, but once you put these cars in a real-world context and have trees flickering through your peripheral vision, you realise just how monstrously quick the LT and 488 really are. The best bit? Like the Golf, they breed confidence. Not quite the familiarity and instant bond of the VW, but twiddle the right settings, and neither feels like it wants to skin you alive. Both have cast-iron trustworthy front ends, both bite down into the tarmac like they have claws in the tyres. But unlike the Golf, they get up to seriously antisocial speeds in eyeblinks. Both provide the kind of turbo mid-range shove that natural aspiration can only dream of, and either can still provide enough suspension finesse to keep everything in order, even on marginal roads. They are gobsmacking in their ability. They also sound good. Not naturally aspirated good, but vocal and interesting and not at all sane. 

But. And it’s a big but… both the McLaren and the Ferrari can be massively frustrating. To really let them loose, to really push either of these cars on the public road, you have to be a bit of an antisocial git. You will catch cars faster than they can comprehend, and you will be arriving at speeds that leave little room for error. You’ll have to find the right road, the right day and a very specific moment to feel these cars really press against their titanic limits. Of course there are track days and isolated, secret bits of tarmac. But if anyone tells you that they drive a McLaren 675LT or a Ferrari 488 to their limit on a regular basis on a public road, they’re most probably lying, or deserve to get nicked. These aren’t really supercars anymore, they’re junior hypercars. And with such power, comes responsibility. 

The Giulia, on the other hand, you get to play with more regularly. And it’s a car that makes you happy for more than just velocity’s sake. It looks great – the slightly generic aesthetic means it probably won’t date too hard – and there’s an attitude here that elevates the QV above the fast-saloon hegemony. The engine is fabulous, the transmission accurate and rapid. The way it barrels down a hairpin will have you grinning like your head might fall off at any second, and there’s a deep sense that this is simply a very cool car to be seen in. It might not have the laptimes of a BMW M5 or M3, but, bluntly, I don’t care. It’s not perfect, but for some reason that just adds to the character, the steering is so rabidly quick and helium light that you can fumble initial turn-in until you get used to it (which you do, eventually), the brakes could do with a bit of extra feel and it can feel heavy on downhill, off-camber hairpins. But powering out of the same tight corner, the rear just verging into oversteer and the V6 bellowing, there’s not much like it on sale. 

But even the Giulia doesn’t – quite – tick all the boxes. Despite every car in the final five being an absolutely glorious place to spend time, there was one car that made every single driver raise a quizzical eyebrow in appreciation...

Check back tomorrow to see the winner of the 2016 Top Gear Speed Week