The Stig presents Speed Week

Welcome to Top Gear magazine's Speed Week, a celebration of all that's good about performance cars in 2013. A delve into some of the most exciting, innovative, outrageous and flat-out rapid cars of the past 12 months, on road and track. This is Top Gear, though, and we do things differently...

In the past year, makers have come up with myriad ways of going fast - and some of the statistics on offer make physicists angry. But numbers are bloodless, with even TG maths unable to account for the thing we call the fizz. The Top Gear ideal is a lot more passionate: cars that make you rise early on a Sunday morning, just for the joy of it.

The result is... eclectic. We've got cars that cost less than 20 grand, all the way to priceless. We've got front-engined hatches that drive the front, rear or all four wheels, mid-engined supercars with AWD or RWD, and yet another whose front-mid-mounted engine drives just the back pair of tyres. We've got a mid-engined, RWD sports car, a front-engined, RWD roadster, a ballistic AWD estate car and a one-off, road-legal racing car with a sub-1.0-litre engine. Turbos, superchargers and vehicles with 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 12 cylinders. Just for the hell of it, there's a concept-slash-racing car, too. There's even The Stig's ride-on lawnmower. But before you laugh, remember this is The Stig, and he's not wired properly.

Yes, it's called Speed Week, but that's only because ‘Performance Cars-with-an-Almost-Indefinable-Sense-of-Joy Week' is a total git to use as a headline. So that's it. It's time for Top Gear Speed Week 2013.