As I sat back to think about the best drives I've had this year, the Ferrari 458 leapt immediately to mind. Along with the snarling, slithery, sideways Mercedes SLS. Both these cars are brilliant in their own way, but, sadly, both were launched in 2009. So making either my COTY for 2010 would be like giving the Best Picture Oscar™ this year to Born Free.
This year? Hmmm. Most of the cars we've seen creeping into showrooms were designed in a climate of fear, two years ago, when the banks were on their knees, Lehman Brothers had gone, AIG was up a creek without a paddle, and no one knew what would happen next.
Words: Jeremy Clarkson
See the full winners list
This article was originally published in the Awards issue of Top Gear magazine
It takes a bold man, at a time like that, to stand up and say: "Right. Let us pool what little money we have left and design a magnificent car which will be ready when the economy is on its feet again". In fact, it takes such an astonishing level of bravery that no one did.
Ferrari made the half-arsed 599 GTO. Lamborghini pulled the plug on its four-door saloon. Aston began work on a city car. And Bentley? God knows what Bentley did. But the people there are plainly so ashamed of the Mulsanne, they won't let me drive it. Everyone else, judging by the number of electric cars coming onto the market, broke out the Duracells.
For sure, Porsche continued to fit bits of scaffolding in the back of a car it's been making since the South Sea Bubble calamity, and Bugatti squeezed a few more horsepowers from its Veyron. But despite what Messrs Hammond and May might tell you elsewhere, I don't think either could be judged as all-new, or particularly noteworthy.
Happily, however, in this sea of mediocrity, there's always Pagani. Financed by God-knows-what and seemingly immune to the word's financial vicissitudes, the little Italian company plods along, endlessly refining the Zonda to keep its equally well insulated customers from going mad with boredom.
We were told that the mainstay would die this year and that a new car would replace it. But that didn't happen. Instead, what we got was a Now That's What I Call Driving Greatest Hits version of the Zonda. The last hurrah for the lion in orange dungarees.
It's called the R, it costs £1.2 million, I wrote about it at some length last month, and I don't intend to recycle old material here. I'm not Porsche. But I can tell you that it did provide the best drive of the year. And the worst...
I like the idea of a car that was specifically designed to be useless. A car that can neither be raced nor used on the road. I also like the attention to detail. It really is worth examining the way Pagani's fused the carbotanium panels so the weave creates a V shape. Doing that is neither necessary nor even very noticeable. But when you do notice it, you think: "If they've gone to that much trouble with something that doesn't matter, how much effort have they put into the stuff that does?"
A lot, I suspect. The whole car is longer and laid out differently to the standard Zonda, if there ever was such a thing. It has a different engine too and a flappy-paddle gearbox which, when you pull the lever, feels like someone has just dropped an aircraft carrier into a piece of quarrying equipment
It's fast, though. The whole car is fast, in fact. So fast that I simply don't know how fast it goes. I know it shattered the lap record at the Nürburgring, getting round in 6.47, but I spent a whole day at Imola with the R, and not once did I emerge from any corner thinking "Well, I can't do that any faster." I just kept blasting round and round under the blazing Italian sun, thinking lots of things, but mostly how lucky I am to have such a wonderful job.
Then the R came to the TopGear track. And broke down.
So we sat about all day while good-looking men with laptops failed to get it going. The next day, it burst into life and their test driver took it for a spin. But he did exactly that - spin - and so it broke down again. Apparently, it won't work if it even so much as looks like rain. Which makes it even more useless than I'd thought.
But then again, when its slicks are hot and that AMG 6.0-litre, 740 horsepower, race lump is nearing the red line and you've just been through Tamburello at 160mph and your head is pinned into the headrest and your ears are bleeding and you daren't change down because your kidneys can't take the battering and you're a little bit frightened by the speed and the savagery and the thrill of it all... who cares if you can't take it shopping in the drizzle?
It doesn't have a boot, either. But it's still my Car of the Year. And probably would have been, even if 2010 had been a vintage year, which it most definitely wasn't.
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