The hare, the tortoise, and the dinosaur

We were discussing the outrageous pace of modern performance cars at a recent Ti meeting, when our digital marketing specialist Matt (a man who owns two identical Kia Sportages) shrugged and uttered the eight immortal words, ‘everyone goes the same speed on the motorway’.

But imagine you’re not on the motorway, a dual carriageway or a busy A-road, but upon a carefully curated selection of the best driving roads this country has to offer. What then? Could all those hundreds of extra whinnying nags under your bonnet (or boot lid in this case) actually translate to quicker progress across the ground?

To answer this profound question we have assembled quite the group test. What we’d argue is the fastest all-season point-to-point car on sale today, the recently launched Porsche 911 Turbo S, what might just be the slowest car (a Citroën Ami is not a car) on sale today, the Kia Picanto 1.0 Pure, and to ground us against this onslaught of progress, the fastest point-to-point car of 40 years ago, the original Audi Quattro. And yes, that is an upper-case ‘Q’, the word ‘quattro’ properly pertaining only to the four-wheel drive system.