The top 50 fun cars for every budget: the final five

3. McLaren 720S

A podium position for McLaren’s fastest mainstream offering, and if it weren’t busy doing brilliantly so many other things that are not relevant to qualifying for this list (like being the most comfortable long-distance mid-engined car in history), it could have been higher still. As it stands, the 720S is the most broadly capable supercar we have known.

In a straight line it is so fast, you can live with one as your daily driver for six months and for the novelty not to wear thin. That alone means it is a car that turns a journey into an adventure. But its poise and precision point to point is, if anything, even more compelling. On a track there are few cars entitled to wear a numberplate that will stay with it. Yet this is no fair-weather recreation. It is the way it encourages you to use it all the time that is perhaps its most endearing trait.

2. Alpine A110

You could swap this with our winner and we’d understand entirely. If you’re someone who believes the amount of fun a car provides is measured not just by the level of pure driving enjoyment it can muster but the number of different ways it can be enjoyed, the A110 is perhaps the best there is.

A joy on the shortest journey, undertaken with the slimmest of justifications, just gently guiding it from place to place, is a pleasure of rare quality. Thanks to its light weight and slim hips, and because it has been set up by people who really understand suspension in general and damper control in particular, it provides a feel for and confidence on the road, an intimacy between man and machine you’ll struggle to find in most supercars. And there’s no need to buy the ‘S’. We love it just the way it is.

1. Ariel Atom 4

We did worry a bit when we heard the all-new Atom 4 was going to be turbocharged. We worried about its restricted rev range, its lack of aural engagement and what all that torque might do to a chassis that, at times, had struggled to deal with the far less grunty supercharged engine from the Ariel Atom 3.5.

Then we drove it. And no, the engine doesn’t spin quite as hard as the last, nor does it have that haunting wail, but that’s not what you’re going to be thinking about. You’ll be struggling instead to believe what you’ve just witnessed. First you won’t believe any car could be as fast across open ground as this, and if you opt to leave the engine in the most powerful output setting, you’ll be braver than most.