Prepare for Top Gear Magazine’s Speed Week!

Fourteen of 2013’s finest performance machines. 5,489bhp. 87 cylinders. Europe’s scariest circuit. And one fearless white-helmeted racing automaton.

That’s the recipe for Top Gear magazine’s Speed Week, the ultimate fast-car showdown documented in our August issue, on sale Wednesday 17 July. The mission was simple: to find this year’s very best fast car on both road and track. The results were… spectacular.

You’ll notice, in that first line, we say ‘performance machines’ rather than ‘performance cars’. That’s because, alongside the devastating road cars – the Merc SLS Black, Lambo Aventador Roadster, Jag F-Type and Porsche Cayman, to name but three – we also brought along a few wildcards.

Wildcards like Renault’s TwinRun concept, which turns out to be no creaking trailer queen but a bona fide bonkers race car. Wildcards like the road-legal Formula Ford Ecoboost racer, which proved – with a quite astonishing lap time – that there is indeed a replacement for displacement.

And wildcards, most wildly, like our 130mph, 109bhp Honda mower, driven in anger for the very first time by Groundskeeper Stiggie on circuit and grass. Trust us, until you’ve seen a fearless man in white cresting the ton down the pit straight in a small ride-on mower before – without braking – taking a ‘shortcut’ over several acres of French grass, you’ve not truly lived.

Witness all this and more – Merc’s deranged A45 AMG, the Mini GP, a yet-hotter edition of Ford’s Fiesta ST – in the next issue of Top Gear magazine, available in paper form and in videotastic, fully interactive guise on iPad.

And if you need a little something to whet your appetite, take a look at the video below…