Bear with me... this is going to be long...
Mazda Protege
At the turn of the decade, Mazda was a car company known for making the Miata and a bunch of other vehicles. Said other vehicles were anonymously handsome, if a bit anonymous, and vaguely sporty, if a bit slow. Then Mazda got serious, releasing hits such as the Mazda6 and RX8.
Before the award-winning 626-derived Mazda6, there was the forgotten 626-derived Protege. A solid little car with great balance and a sporty feel. The special edition MP3 went one better with a tighter geared steering rack and suspension, better anti-roll bars and 10 more horsepower.
But with just 142 ponies, it was pathetic in a straight line. And the brakes wilted after just a few hard stops. Despite these shortcomings, this car has been my benchmark for handling manners and steering feel since I got it. It’s only recently that I’ve driven mass-market econoboxes that can approach it in this regard. This was one of the best of the last of the hydraulic steering cars, and it’s been my daily driver for the past five years.
Mention could be made of the special edition Mazdaspeed Protege, but as it wasn’t very speedy and prone to chewing up LSDs and gearboxes, I won’t.
Still, in the end, they only made a few thousand MP3s, and a few more MSPs. How’s that for exclusive, eh, Ferrari?
*yes, I'm only including it because I own one... but who cares? All top ten lists that don't include the Prius and the Corolla are bound to be subject to debate... 
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Ford Focus Mark 2 and 2.5
I’ve looked hard and long into my heart to see whether I could put the Mazda3 here. But I can’t. That’s because the Mazda3’s steering isn’t as good as the Protege’s. And the suspension, so supple at low speeds, goes all to pieces at high speeds over heaves.
But the Focus... never have two such similar products been so different.
The Focus’s steering is as feelsome as all get out. The suspension manages to be supple yet controlled at speed. And the balance is wonderful. It’s hard to believe that you could basically swap suspensions between the Focus and Mazda3 with little difficulty (shave a bolt here, a bolt there), yet the Focus feels so much better. Despite the compact rear suspension, excellent damping, camber control and passive rear steer make the Focus as easy as a go-kart to balance on the cusp of oversteer. Not that you could get much on the stock rubber, but it’s there.
The 2.5 facelift made it even better. Tweaks in the suspension fix the handling balance for the heavier 2.0 models and the Focus RS “revo-knuckle” blurs the final line between McPherson and double-wishbone suspensions. The Focus RS, in fact, finally makes 300 hp
work in a front-wheel drive vehicle.
Who needs AWD?
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Honda Fit (1st generation)
Okay, so the 2nd generation car is twice as clever and twice as good, but the 1st generation Honda Fit is to the 00s what the Civic was to the 90’s. Sure, it’s got McPhersons and a rear cart axle instead of the double-wishbones and multi-link suspension of the older car, but clever suspension engineering and bushing deflection give it good handling. And the car’s stiff chassis and light weight make it a cracker to drive.
No, it’s not perfect. The ride is stiff-legged and the steering is complete 🤬, but the Honda Fit isn’t just about driving hard. The Honda Fit’s real party piece is the Swiss Army Knife interior. Infinite seating and cargo configurations, and an interior big enough to swallow a whale (must.resist.using.the.word.Tardis...). Sure, some competitors, like the Suzuki Swift and Mazda2, may be more fun in some aspects, but no other small car comes quite so close to convincing you your full-sized motor is now obsolete.
And it gets 30 mpg at full blat. That’s as guilt-free as hoonery gets.
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Mini (1st/2nd generation BMW Mini)
It’s retro that actually
works. The Mini shows that you
can sell economical cars to rich people, as long as they’ve got style. Never mind that there are premium compacts that are more practical (and actually have a rear seat), none of them have the panache of the Mini. And the Mini drives well, too. With a square wheelbase and a low center of gravity, it drives like a closed-roof go-kart. Hyperkinetic. The electric steering has gone all soft in the new generation, but even without resorting to “Sport” mode, it’s still tight and responsive. The engines feel bigger than they actually are, thanks to the (relative) light weight, and driving at the edge has never been so
easy.
Okay... so maybe it’d be better if they ditched the runflats (our local dealership has, thankfully) and more space would be nice (without the ugly Clubman styling), but since when have premium cars been
logical?
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Nissan 350Z / Hyundai Genesis V6 Coupe
I’ve called the 350Z, at one time or another, a horseman of the apocalypse. When manufacturers start making stupidly powerful sports cars with affordable price tags, that means that the common man has reached a point where he has total contempt for the amount of petrol he consumes on his way to work, which means an oil crisis is inevitable. The 350Z heralded the return of the rear-wheel drive sports car for the masses, rendered extinct when the overweight, overpriced 300ZX twin-turbo finally died out during the last oil crisis. The 350Z returned to the 240Z ethos, small, simple car, zingy engine. Okay, maybe it
is a porker compared to the original, but it’s as simple as a sportscar can be in this day and age without being a Miata. Pre-350Z, we had bumpkis (okay, we had the S2000, but that’s a dinosaur. A Velociraptor, yes, but still a dinosaur). Post-350Z, we got the new Mustang, the Camaro, the RX8... and now, the Genesis.
The Genesis takes power for the masses to a new level, giving people high performance and style for peanuts. And it signals that, yes, Hyundai is now serious business. Here is a sportscar built from the ground up, with engines developed completely in-house, by a company whose previous sportscar was a front-wheel drive coupe with engines and bones rooted in stone-age Mitsubishis. Ironic, then, that Mitsubishi is now buying engines from them. He who laughs last...
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Audi RS4
Okay, so maybe the R8 put Audi on the map as a serious supercar maker for the 21st century. 4 comes before 8. It was the V8-Quattro RS4 that showed us all that Audi had suddenly remembered how to make cars
fun again. The RS4 had a rorty, high-revving V8 mounted too far forward over the front axle, mated to Audi’s all-wheel drive (more at home pulling estates through snow than defying physics), and stuck in the dowdy A4 bodyshell.
Yet here was the first Audi to seriously worry BMW. It was leery, it was gnarly, it was fun. Too bad the synergies didn’t carry over too well into the TT range... and too bad Audi eventually lost interest and spent more time trumpeting something called the R10 TDi (which has yet to spawn a diesel Audi supercar... pity). For one brief shining moment, the RS4 was “it”.
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BMW X5
It’s an SUV, strike one. It’s a stupidly expensive SUV, strike two. It’s a stupidly expensive SUV that can't even go off-road, strike three. And yet, the first time I encountered an X5 on a public road was at 3 in the morning, doing over a hundred miles an hour uphill, with me giving chase. Each time we got to a tricksy corner, I’d pull up on him in perfect position to pass, as this two ton behemoth struggled against inertia and its own stupidly high center of gravity.
I never did complete that pass. Because he’d soon be past the apex of the corner and I’d be fighting the steering wheel and my own lack of mechanical grip. He had four-wheel drive, ultra-wide tires and a sophisticated computer system helping him out. All I had was ABS, a worn set of gums and a car that struggled to keep up on the straights.
So it’s a stupidly expensive car by a company that prides itself on making “The Ultimate Driving Machines” that corners
almost as well as a warmed-over economy car and needs the computing power of NASA to do so. I was hooked. Instantly. The absurdity of it all only came more into focus when I finally got to drive one years later. It cornered well, felt light on its feet, and danced between turns like an oversized Miata. Delightful.
Sure, the Cayenne soon completely overshadowed the X5, with its better interiors, actual off-road capability and a nameplate worth its weight in gold. It was still the X5 that started the whole thing. It put the “Sport” back into Sport Utility Vehicles, leading to all manner of stupidly expensive, stupidly powerful, stupidly capable SUVs. As such, it’s probably as much a horseman of the carpocalypse as the 350Z, but at least it comes in diesel. And that diesel variant, surprisingly, is as much fun as it is economical.
Still stupidly expensive.
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Nissan GT-R
It was either this or the Veyron. But the Veyron has four engines welded together at the sump, four turbos, sixeen kajillion radiators, a gearbox that costs a small country and bespoke tires. Anything with that much hardware crammed into it is going to be epic, no matter how much it weighs. The Nissan, on the other hand, makes do with a bored-out V6, two measly turbos and a single radiator. It’s got sticky tires, but they’re off-the-shelf items. It doesn’t even make half as much power as the Veyron. But no other performance car has generated as much hype or controversy over the past few years as the GT-R.
The GT-R is proof positive that clever engineering trumps physics, every time. With a measly 485 bhp and a porky curb weight just a few Big Macs shy of the Veyron, it conquers many lighter (and often more powerful) sports cars with ease. But it wasn’t always an overachiever. The current GT-R’s abilities came about because Nissan threw a fit when their new supercar couldn’t break below 7:50 on the Nurburgring. They hired a small outfit called Lotus (of Isuzu Trooper fame) to redo the suspension.
That suspension tweaking, some better tires, a low-friction drivetrain, clever variable geometry turbos and more computers than ten X5s all conspired to make the GT-R faster than a Porsche 911 Turbo. And a Corvette Z06. And a few Ferraris, as well.
The GT-R serves as an online intelligence test. If you don’t understand why peak power numbers aren’t as important as average horsepower, and that traction is often more important than power on a slippery road, you’ll never understand the GT-R.
I’d still prefer a Porsche GT3, though.
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Pagani Zonda
The Veyron may have stolen the limelight from the Zonda as the supercar of the decade, but the Zonda still stands as the perfect marriage of traditional supercar values and modern performance. It’s a work of art on wheels, and the fact that it’s ultra-lightweight, drives well, is actually
reliable and has the most perfect carbon fiber weave ever laid by hand is merely icing on the cake. This is the true successor to the McLaren F1 (lightness uber alles) and sets a new benchmark for exotics.
Not much to say about this one. It simply speaks for itself. The Zonda is pure automotive car porn.
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Thank goodness Wikimedia has all these photos in easily thumbable sizes.
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