Britain's Best Driver's Car 2018: and the winner is...

McLaren has already hit dizzying heights with the £750,000 Senna this year and might go on to similar ones with the equally high-end Speedtail in 2019 – but the 600LT shows that its attention can be lavished just as generously on cars at the more attainable end of its showroom range, and to spectacular results. It is a superb track car and a quite sublime fast road car – and now it’s officially the very best new driver’s car of the year to boot. 

What was quickest?

It looks like a sizeable lead to carve out over a 71sec lap but, if anything, the 1.7sec lap time advantage of the Ferrari 488 Pista over the rest of the Britain’s Best Driver’s Car 2018 field actually seems to understate the car’s advantage on accelerative potency and outright grip. 

Take a look at the spot comparison of prevailing speed we took on the exit of Anglesey’s Target corner and you get a better idea of what the Ferrari is capable of. Here we compared speed on corner exit at exactly the point at which each of the cars passed downwards beyond 0.8g of lateral load on its way straight again.

That the 488 Pista is the only car in three figures here, travelling fully 7mph quicker than the next quickest car, says it all about its remarkable levels of adhesion and acceleration. In only one place was the Pista anything but the quickest car on test: at the apex of the off-camber Peel corner. 

We did everything possible to ensure a fair lap time comparison, but with 10 cars to get through on a day with plenty of other testing going on, some compromise to perfect like-for-like test conditions was unavoidable. As such, on Michelin Cup R tyres fresher than they were at the time of testing, the Porsche’s lap time might have been a second or so quicker. For similar reasons, both the Aston Martin’s showing and the Lotus’s might have been subject to lesser improvements, although neither likely to be worth enough to move it up the table below by more than one place.