Top Gear's Top 9: underwhelming engine bays

Mid-engined sports cars may be beautifully balanced, but it’s very tricky to show off the engine when it’s buried deep in the car. Lotus swapped the K-series engine for Toyota’s 2ZZ-GE four pot when it launched the Series 2 Exige, but it didn’t look all that exciting with the cover popped up.

Lots of carmakers fill their engine bays with black plastic covers these days (the supercharged V8 F-Type R springs to mind), but none seem to have gone as far as Lexus with the current LS 500. There is actually a twin-turbo 3.4-litre V6 under there, but you wouldn’t know it.

Ask most hypercar creators and they’ll tell you that big V12s shouldn’t just sound like a work of art, they should look like one too. Unfortunately, the world forgot to mention this to Jaguar in the 1970s. Open the bonnet in an XJS and you’ll find a maze of wires and hoses.

From the water cooled 996 generation onwards, if you open the rear letterbox of a Porsche 911 you won’t see much of the flat six engine. In fact, you won’t see much at all. Both the 991 and the current 992 only let you ogle a couple of fans.

If you encountered this GT40 in the wild and politely asked to see under the rear clamshell, you’d be pretty disappointed to find a load of orange high voltage cables and a metal box with some electric gubbins in it. The perils of the EV restomod.

If you need to read the manual or watch a YouTube video to remove your engine cover, it’s probably not going to be the most glamourous engine bay. Dig down below the roof mechanism and the third gen Boxster’s powerplant is not a looker.

Perhaps an outlier on this list because you might not be expecting much excitement under the bonnet of a Morris Minor, but even so the dinky little A-series engine in the Minor 1000 looks lost in there. Heck, an LS V8 might even fit in that gap. Now there’s an idea...

Because the original Ford Capri was designed to take an Essex V6, when it was equipped with the teeny pre-Crossflow Kent four cylinder engine things certainly looked a little less... impressive. With under 50bhp, performance wasn’t exactly mindblowing either.

With its chunky arches and amber daytime running lights, the Bronco Raptor looks pretty mean. Its 412bhp twin turbo 3.0-litre V6 is pretty punchy too, but open the bonnet and even a top mechanic would struggle to find the actual engine under all of those hoses.