The definition of a supercar may have changed over the past two decades, but that fact hardly makes the metal content that makes up this class any less sensational.
Here it’s the world’s greatest mid-engined, upper-level performance machines we’re celebrating: not the very highest echelon of the performance car market, but rather the kind of cars you think about when you picture a modern Ferrari, McLaren or Lamborghini. If it wasn't a lucrative club to be in, the likes of Maserati and Aston Martin wouldn't now be queuing up to enter themselves.
Topping this class means demonstrating that your designers and engineers can master an inherently tricky dynamic brief, stand the heat of particularly intense competition, and satisfy some of the most demanding customers in motordom.
1. McLaren 720S
The McLaren 720S has succeeded where both of its predecessors (the 650S and the MP4-12C) fell short in our supercar class chart: purely and simply, by topping it.
There are few more direct or effective ways for cars in this stratum of the performance car market to demonstrate their superiority than by accelerating faster, lapping quicker and stopping harder than any rival. The 720S does all three. In many of the performance benchmarks that road testers are used to measuring, in fact, this 710bhp blockbuster is a closer match for a contemporary hypercar than one of its mid-engined opponents.
Yet also it's uncommonly communicative and easy to drive, it's a supreme ergonomic achievement and it flatters a rambunctious track style more rewardingly than any of its predecessors.
McLaren launched a lighter, faster and generally more track-focused version of the 720S, the 765LT, in 2020. Power and torque had been lifted to 754bhp and 590lb ft respectively, while the engineers shaved 80kg in weight. It's a very special car indeed and itself also an Autocar Top Ten chart-topper, being ranked seperately in our hardcore sports cars chart.
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2. Ferrari SF90 Stradale
This successor of sorts to the LaFerrari hypercar is the most powerful road car in Ferrari's history. It’s also the car that set the quickest lap time around the firm’s Fiorano test track. Oh, and it’s a plug-in hybrid that can travel for up to 15 miles on electricity alone. The SF90 Stradale is a very different kind of Ferrari, then.
It makes use of a heavily reworked version of the 488 Pista’s twin-turbocharged 3.9-litre V8, which is complemented by a trio of electric motors that raise the Ferrari’s total power output to a staggering 986bhp, allowing for a 0-62mph time of 2.5sec. It’s a technological tour de force for sure yet, despite the additional weight that powertrain brings, it’s still just as incisive, intuitive, engaging and devastatingly quick as you would expect a mid-engined Ferrari to be.
