Welcome to Top Gear’s Speed Week 2018!

This is the big one: 14 of the world’s finest performance cars, a total combined displacement of 48,312cc, 7,640bhp over 36 driven wheels and a whopping £4,052,991 total value.

Welcome, one and all, to Top Gear’s Speed Week 2018.

It’s the most competitive group of cars we’ve ever assembled, and a testament to the diversity and quality of all the Really Fast Things the car world has chucked out over the past 12 months.

We’ve got things like the Ferrari 488 Pista, Porsche 911 GT2 RS, McLaren 600LT, Aston Martin Vantage, Lamborghini Urus and something called a ‘Bugatti Chiron’. Yeah, us neither. It just sort of arrived and everybody was too scared to say no.

The plan was thus: four teams would be dispatched from the UK, Italy, Germany and France, driving through some of Europe’s finest roads to arrive at the Circuit de Charade, a mildly terrifying Seventies-spec Formula 1 circuit.

There, over two days of powersliding, a light argument and many home-made sandwiches, we’d decide which car would emerge victorious as TG’s best performance car of the year. The criteria however, wasn’t empirical, nor based on lap times or power or anything so serious.

It was fun. Something to stir the soul. Something entertaining. After all, we did bring along a Mercedes G63.

Pick up a copy of the latest issue for the full test.