In the Clio you’ve got more room to play, less inertia and predictable, benign on-limit behaviour

Is it telling that of the chosen five lined up outside the hotel, I’m drawn to the Evora? It seems like the ideal place to start the day, an inviting cocoon to clamber into and escape the weather, the perfect place to limber up for a decisive day’s driving, its supple ride and sufficient, relaxed performance just right for a cold start, a re-establishing of baselines. Head down against the gusting drizzle I stride to it, haul open the door and find Chris Harris already comfortable in the driver’s seat. ‘Sorry, mate…’ Ah, bugger.

I glance around. The baby blue Noble is idling briskly some yards away, the air around it pulsing. A bit much, first thing, especially with wet roads. The SV? I don’t yet feel up to its width and the firmness of its steering, seat and ride. GT3? Similarly uncompromising bucket seats and tough ride, plus the challenge of left-hand drive. So, the Clio it is.

‘First time you feel and hear the V12 keen to 8000rpm you think it’s going to rev to oblivion’

Of course, starting with the little Renault gives the opportunity to progress through the final five by ever-increasing power or price. Same thing, as it happens: the biggest numbers in each sequence belong to the 661bhp, $ 443K Lamborghini. Crazy. So can this feisty little hatchback really hope to slay any of its joint-finalists? Of course it can. It has already risen above a whole heap of more exotic motors to be here; yesterday I watched one of them, the badger-faced Balboni, get smaller in the rear- view mirror down a wicked stretch of asphalt.

Even so, leading the Evora, GT3, Noble and SV away from the hotel, heading due south to rejoin the mainland, it doesn’t feel like the Clio is running with the big dogs so much as playing hare to a pack of greyhounds and lurchers.

We’ll see. My fellow judges for this focused last day are Chris Harris, Henry Catchpole, Ollie Marriage and David Vivian. At the end of today, when we’ve driven the finalists in close company and the sun has set, we’ll cast our final votes and the winner will be decided. Right now I have no idea which way it’s going to go.

This early leg isn’t playing to the Clio’s strengths. Sure, it’s no hassle to drive, but if there’s a weakness in its bid for top honours, it’s that when you’re merely ambling, as we are now, there’s little that’s special about it. There’s plenty to distinguish it from the shopping hatch runaround on which it’s based – the Ferrari-esque yellow-faced rev-counter redlined at 7500rpm, the ergonomically shaped wheel rim and the excellent Recaro seats – but the noise is plain and the ride is pretty robust.

Like the 911 GT3 and SV Lamborghini, the Clio 200 with the Cup chassis prefers smooth roads. But that doesn’t mean you have to back off when the road gets turbulent. Occasionally it’s a wild ride but you have to go for it because this is where it strikes its most telling blows, carrying speed the bigger cars can’t because you’ve got more room to play with, less inertia working against you and predictable, benign on-limit behaviour. And maintaining momentum is all, because compared with the other cars here, the Clio doesn’t so much accelerate as gain momentum.

‘The slightly flutey V8 beat ramps up, then spikes as monster torque unhooks the enormous rear tyres’

It’s pretty hard to get up to that pace this early in the day and with such striking light and scenery to distract you. From a rolling, lush green landscape dotted with white-painted houses glowing in the thin, crystal light, we find ourselves heading directly for the dark, jagged peaks of the Cuillins on a wet road that shines like a silver ribbon. I guess the hills are brooding because that’s what they’re supposed to do.

As Harris gives up the seat of the Evora, he says, ‘I reckon you could be very happy every day with this. It’s complete, like the GT3.’

That’s the thing about the Lotus: it doesn’t need to be on a particular sort of road or at a certain pace to impress. Swing yourself over the wide sill, drop into the well-shaped seat, drive a few hundred metres and you know you’re at the wheel of something special. Yes, we’ve gone from sit-up-and-beg to low-slung, from vanilla four-cylinder to two-scoops-and-sprinkles V6 and inside there’s the aroma of leather, but it’s the way the Evora moves down the road, the way it treads so softly but feels connected, the way it steers so delicately but with absolute precision, that instantly lifts your mood.

Over the gentle hump of the Skye bridge and back on to the Scottish mainland; past Eilean Donan castle, immortalised on countless shortbread tins, and from here the A87 becomes more interesting. The sun is out but the road is still wet under the trees and in places the surface dressing has worn away to shiny slickness too. The Evora lets you know but seems unbothered. I lift the pace a notch, using the V6’s generous and smooth mid-range, and the Evora flows along with an easy nimbleness. There might be a lump of engine slung across the rear axle but you don’t need to worry about it, the Lotus settling into a corner with no lag, no fuzziness, and holding its line imperiously before changing tack for the next curve without hesitation.

I’m disappointed to see that the following Lamborghini doesn’t pick up the pace initially. As it’s Harris at the wheel, I summise he must be doing a piece to camera. Turns out not. Discussion in the cockpit was more along the lines of ‘Woah, why’s this thing understeering so much?’ The dry, open, spectacular kilometres that follow are more to its liking. I’ve got the Evora wrung out, getting three red ‘O’s lit before every upshift, and even though I know it’s coming, the sight of the fat Lambo eating up the ground between us is thrilling and slightly scary.

At the next stop, once Harris has got the understeer issue off his chest, he declares: ‘That’s probably the best road for this car, and it still feels too small!’ A few yards away I see a flushed-looking Ollie Marriage nod to the Noble and say to Catchpole ‘It still scares me. You’ve just got to keep it in a high gear and use the torque…’ I press him for further thoughts. ‘It’s the Noble’s odd duality – the Elise-like cornering poise and the Veyron-mashing straight-line shove. You have to work your way up to the big wheelspin moment. Only once you’ve done it and realised that it’s actually quite benign, can you start to work with it. But even then it’s never less than unsettling.’

Viv, who took it from the hotel, has a different take. ‘The beauty of it is that you use as much of it as you want,’ he says. He’s just stepped out of the Clio, the M600’s polar-opposite here. How was that? ‘You can use 98 per cent of its performance and feel happy about it, which is the same as using maybe 50 per cent of the Noble’s. It’s an absolutely brilliant little car.’

Sticking with my plan, I elect to try the GT3 next. Catchpole drove it on that last stretch. ‘It was moving around a lot, more than the previous model, and I wonder if uneven roads are showing it up a bit.’

I turn to where the Porsche is parked and see its doors slamming shut. Harris and cameraman Freddy are aboard. Again. Photographer Stuart Collins asks if I’ll drive the Lambo; he’s keen to see if he can get a shot of its tunnel-like tailpipe belching a great big flame.

Of course the SV spits fire. You’d be disappointed if it didn’t. As Vivian says, ‘it’s a Murciélago with everything turned up to 11’. That’s why the tyres are P Zero Corsas, the seats are fixed-back Alcantara-trimmed buckets, the steering is he-man heavy and the engine, oh boy, the engine is utterly loopy. It sounds heavy metal, like the full 6.5 litres it is, and hauls through the mid-range with a bellowing, swelling, unstoppable determination. And then, at around 5500rpm, it’s as if weight magically melts away from the pistons, conrods and crank and the internal acceleration escalates. First time you feel and hear the V12 keen to 8000rpm you think it’s going to rev to oblivion, going to over-speed and fire 48 valves through the carbonfibre and glass patio that does for an engine cover. Actually, it feels like that every time, only you get used to flipping a paddle to upshift rather than jump out of your skin when it bap-bap-baps against the limiter.

It’s not flaming for Collins, though. Like the fault that disappears the moment you drive onto the dealer’s service entrance, it’s a no-show. There are a couple of powdery pops but no more so it’s suggested I go for a quick strop to see if a hot exhaust helps. Don’t need asking twice.

The engine’s not the craziest thing about the SV, though. What’s sillier is that despite its mass and the fact that all you can see in the widescreen door mirrors is the car’s broad hips, you find yourself driving it like a sports car. You have to muscle it through the corners a bit, but you can sense when to get back on the throttle, fully. The pace at which you can drive is astonishing. It’s almost as if it’s defying physics. And then traction control kicks in mid-way through a long, second-gear turn and you realise it can’t. Chastened, you make a note of the spot for when you come this way in the Noble.

The Lambo’s traction control isn’t a catch-all, though, as Henry discovered earlier in the wet. ‘Yeah, it got out of shape at a big speed,’ he says, arching his eyebrows in a and-that’s-just-not-right look. ‘I was in Corsa mode, though, which backs everything off,’ he admits, before going on to declare that he still loves it. ‘It’s one of those cars where the ride initially feels firm but then you realise it’s not beating you up at all. The engine is magnificent and although it’s not the best paddleshift it does allow you to finesse the throttle, which makes it an engaging paddleshift.’

We’re parked in a lay-by next to a view point for Glen Garry and its shimmering loch, and it’s clearly a popular stop-off for many of the Highland tour companies. There’s a steady stream of coaches disgorging tourists of many nationalities, and a few are unable to resist the lure of an open orange scissor door. Standing a way off, we observe much grinning and gentle, surreptitious leaning-up-against for snaps. ‘Look at us,’ chuckles one tourist with a soft American accent, ‘we come all this way and end up taking photos of cars!’ Us too, us too…

The Noble gets its fair share of attention, too, even though no-one has heard of it. If there’s any justice, that will change. The stupendously quick supercar from Leicester is doing much to impress our judges, some of whom are rather grizzled and have driven more supercars than your average Gran Turismo gamer. Vivian is a big fan: ‘What makes it so special is the sublime steering and the utterly sussed nature of the chassis: its marriage of fantastic grip and traction – within reason – with progressive transient manners and great ride. In short, it’s phenomenal.’

As we stand in the lay-by, the M600 makes a few passes with Catchpole at the wheel, heading for the Collins camera further up the road. On each pass he gasses it in second and the slightly flutey V8 beat ramps up and then spikes as monster torque unhooks the enormous rear tyres, the tail kicking a degree or two out of straight. You can almost taste the horsepower. I bet Viv it’s turned down to 550. He agrees; 650 would be more vicious.

Although the Noble and Lamborghini inhabit a similar region of the supercar landscape, they feel utterly different. Even if you were able to trim 300kg from the SV, you’d still have to go some way to configure a ride and handling balance as inspiring as the M600’s. Like the Evora, the Noble feels exceptionally well damped and poised as soon as you’re rolling, and that feeling never deserts it, even when it’s trying to lay 650bhp on the road. And because it’s so delightfully tactile and rewarding all the time, you don’t simply go hunting for the next opportunity to nail it and feel it morph into a Saturn V rocket.

Even in Riviera Blue, the Porsche attracts little more attention than the Renault. To the trained eye, however, it looks the dog’s danglers. I love the overall look, the stance, the close-fitting wheelarches and the intricate blend of spoilers, lips, intakes and vents at both ends. It looks like a proper weapon, the result of a dedication to evolution, which it is. But the detail that does it for me is the script on the end-plates of the rear wing that say ‘3.8’. It’s an evocative 911 displacement and an extraordinary one married with an output of 429bhp. In character, this flat-six is like the Lambo V12; it gets loud and gutsy at around 4500rpm and launches for the red line, going utterly nuts when it gets within a couple of thousand revs of the 8500rpm mark, like someone throwing petrol on a fire. Incredible.

‘What sets the GT3 apart for me,’ says Marriage, ‘is that it’s as wieldy as the Evora but packs the dynamic punch of the supercars here. It’s edgy yet trustworthy and the clarity of communication is dazzling.’

There’s no slack in the GT3; it almost pings with tautness. It’s an incredibly precise and effortlessly quick car in the dry. Show just a little commitment and it will deliver. Show it more and it will deliver even more. I had a brilliant drive in it yesterday, dropping the Noble in just a few corners when it didn’t feel like I was really trying, and it feels great here too, so up for it. The short-throw gearlever seems to get grabbed by the next gear as you slot across the gate, the carbon-ceramic brakes are full of bite and feel and the thin bucket seat locates you decisively. Traction is absolute, the thin-rim wheel steers it with laser precision and the flat-six’s searing, manic top end feels no less than its due.

Harris is a fan (no, really). ‘It’s a clever car, it kinda does everything. Best GT3 they’ve made? For me, yeah. Easily. It moves into the first part of a turn better than the mk1 997 GT3, and you don’t realise how much more torque there is until you back-to-back them.’

I’m not so sure. It feels much more stiffly set up. ‘It’s great if you’re in the mood and want to drive fast but driving only briskly it’s fidgety to the point of distraction,’ says Catchpole. And Marriage, who drove it from Reading to Glasgow, testifies that it’s not great over long distances. It would be unwise to bet against it taking the evo Car of the Year title back to Stuttgart yet again, though…

It’s clear as the scores come in that it’s going to be a a two-horse race for the top slot, and a very close one at that. The fact that the $ 27K Clio comes in fifth probably doesn’t come as a surprise but the simple fact that it made the cut shows that it’s one very special little car. Vivian sums it up perfectly. ‘We tend not to talk about ‘fun’ when we’re in analytical mode but that’s what the 200 Cup delivers in spades. It’s such a cohesive package; there just seems the right amount of everything and everything works in perfect harmony.’

‘The roads today haven’t helped and I do think it is slightly over-awed in this company,’ says Harris, ‘but it’s still, for the money, staggering, isn’t it?’ Both Catchpole and I reckon it might have done even better had it been the more supple non-Cup chassis…

‘What sets the GT3 apart is that it’s as wieldy as the Evora but packs the dynamic punch of the supercars here’

Fourth goes to the LP670-4 SV, a damned exciting and accomplished supercar that comes with a heavy dose of drama in all the important areas – styling, ambience, performance and noise. ‘What a glorious, unreconstructed, old- school supercar,’ says Marriage. And what an effective one, too, inspiring confidence to revel in the sound and fury of the sensational V12. ‘Yes, the Noble made it feel clumsy in a couple of areas – you could tell it was a much heavier car, for instance – but what I loved about the SV was its attitude, its sheer OTT-ness. And for me, natural V12 beats turbo V8 every time. At least when it’s done this well.’

The small team in Barwell, Leicestershire, should be very proud that their supercar has pushed a top-drawer Lamborghini out of a podium place. The M600 has no ABS, no stability control, traction control that wasn’t hooked up, two-wheel drive and 650bhp. And what saw it rise to the top was its remarkably supple and controlled ride, exploitable and capable handling and sublime steering.

Over to Chris Harris. ‘It’s awesome. It’s not like anything else I’ve ever driven. It’s the fastest car here, which is something I didn’t expect, it rides beautifully and it steers beautifully.’

‘The steering is probably the most impressive thing about the whole car,’ says Vivian. ‘The way you can feed it into bends and it always feels settled, which is necessary because then you’ve got to decide at which point to open the taps…’

Oh yes. There were moments on damp roads that would put your thumping heart in your mouth – it’s probably fast enough with 550bhp – and the heavyweight brake pedal wasn’t to all tastes but it put you in touch and put you in charge, and that’s a rare combination today.

So, what’s it to be? GT3 or Evora? Two quite different cars, two quite different experiences. Exquisite evolution or exceptional achievement from a clean sheet? When the final votes came in, it became clear that most of us had found them very hard to separate. The GT3 delivers higher highs and lower lows, the Evora everyday, every-journey brilliance. When the scores were tallied up, the Evora just nicked it, an average of 96.0 versus 95.5.

Harris has the GT3 ahead. ‘I find it easier to make allowances for the Porsche’s few deficiencies in its chassis than I do for the deficiencies in the Lotus’s powertrain,’ he says.

Catchpole has the Porsche ahead, too, by just half a percentage point… ‘The 911 just beats the Evora because as much as I am in awe of how the Lotus moves across the tarmac and the confidence it inspires and the wonderful balance it possesses, it never managed to give me the moments of sheer exhilaration and joy that the GT3 did. If the two were sitting in the car park I know which one’s keys I would reach for nine times out of ten.’

It’s a fair point. But the GT3 can feel uncomfortable at ordinary speeds. Compared with the previous model, it feels more like a track car with edges rounded for the road than a road car that will have enough edge on track. Vivian agrees: ‘It’s a wonderful thing and deeply rewarding but the ride is simply too hard; it got on my tits after a while.’ So the Lotus Evora is our Car of the Year. It’s not flawless, it’s not the most exciting car to look at, but it’s a magical thing across the ground, deft like an Elise, with exceptional poise and feel. What was telling for me was that, getting into it after any of the other finalists, it was even better than I remembered: a bit smoother, a bit quicker and even sweeter dynamically, too. It’s a beguiling car.

Vivian was charmed. ‘Once in a while a car comes along that forces you to disassemble your critical apparatus and put it back together in such a way that it can accommodate a new paradigm. Last year it was the Nissan GT-R, this year it’s the Evora – a car of such stunning dynamic prowess that not even a lousy gearchange, a less-than-inspirational Toyota engine, a shape with some dubious angles and joke rear seats can dent the achievement. A quite brilliant car and worthy winner.’

The last word goes to Marriage: ‘The more I drove it the more I got into it. You never tire of all these lovely messages being gently fed back to you. It’s not as insistent, as demanding of your attention as the GT3, and that makes it a great car to live with and drive every day. It’s a huge achievement, the biggest of 2009.’

‘The Lotus Evora is our Car of the Year. It’s not flawless, but it’s a magical thing across the ground’