THE MAGNIFICENT ELEVEN

There has rarely been a more diverse bunch of contenders for Britain's Best Driver's Car. Which is best? Let's find out

Welcome to the 35th running of our annual Britain's Best Driver's Car contest, which, as you may know, we refer to by its Auto car office code name of Handling Day.Because that's how it started out: a day of testing cars' handling on a circuit.

The format has since been honed into one that most accurately guides us towards a great driver's car: three days of driving, one spent on great roads and two at a great race track. It gives us the time and the space to get to know the cars inside and out and explore their limit handling. A number of places will do it, but Wales and Anglesey tend to do it best, so we're back.

It's worth remembering, too, that these are the 10 best sports cars of the year plus last year's winner (of a fashion, but we'll get to that in a moment). There isn't a duffer among them. So if a car finishes 11th here, it would still end up top of most group tests in which it might find itself. Perhaps the question, then, is: if our daily commute happened to involve a few laps of a circuit followed by 30 miles of twisting, challenging open roads, which of these cars would we drive most over the next 12 months?

To decide, we take five experienced testers (Matt Saunders having been called away to test a 1000bhp Lamborghini), each of whom has up to 50 points to allocate per car, scoring for how much fun a car is on road and track. Then we tot up the results and declare a winner.

Before we continue, a quick word on the Porsche 911 GT3, which has won the past two BBDC contests. As is very occasionally the way, a winning car gets superseded or overwhelmed by other cars in its range: the GT3 RS and Dakar are new in the past year, both deserve a spot and we can hardly have three 911s in the line-up...