Top Ten Supercars of All Time
How do you distil the essence of the supercar? It’s an intangible thing, there’s no hard-and-fast set of rules; we know that it has to be something unusual and out-of-the-ordinary, a car with flair and panache. One that looks sensational, and has colossal horsepower from an engine with many, many cylinders. It should stop people in their tracks, cause grown-ups to mop their brows and kids to whip out their phones and snap it for the ’Gram. What we’re trying to pin down here is a formula which refuses to be defined: the wow factor.
There have been countless interpretations of the supercar concept over the last five or six decades. Sylph-like Italian masterpieces, brutal American tyre-slayers, artisanal British craft creations… some manufacturers have even managed to sanitise the formula – the Honda NSX and Audi R8 both worked to democratise the supercar (well, to a degree at least) and make it practical and everyday usable as well as heartflutteringly thrilling. Others have imbued their sports models with ever-greater chassis and swelling levels of horsepower to bridge the gap between sports car and supercar, as with the various RS-model Porsche 911s, Chevrolet’s Corvette ZR1, and the brilliantly surprising Nissan GT-R. But supercars really need to be a bit madder than this. Take the Koenigsegg Agera (or, indeed, any Koenigsegg) – a car that deliberately blazes its own technological trail and somehow achieves supremely unlikely top speeds. There are the super-premium special editions, like Aston Martin’s jewel-like One-77, and the daft homologation specials, such as the Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR. The pretty hellraisers that stud automotive history with their unique wiles – the De Tomaso Mangusta’s butterfly engine lids, the Jaguar XKSS’s translation of race car to road car, the Ferrari Testarossa’s sheer imposing width. And let’s not forget the obscure curios, like the Vector W8, Isdera Imperator, Panther Solo and Cizeta-Moroder V16T.
But the true greats? The top ten of all time? These have to be the cars which moved the game forward, that aren’t just celebrated for what they
