Jeremy Clarkson and the best car in the world.

You've just got to love his lines - this 1's from this month's topgear magazine : "You've got to respect God's morphing abilities. Water into wine is good, but dead fish into petrol is so much better."

lol

This month they're doing a Ferrari 360 vs. Porsche 911 Turbo and though I haven't read it yet, IMO it's got to be the Ferrari. The Porsche is the typical German car and the Ferrari; oh so Italian.

You can tell which is better just by looking at them. Ferrari spent a ridiculous amount of time in the wind tunnel testing the 360, getting the aerodynamics perfect so they wouldn't have to spoil the lines of the car with a rear spoiler. You get the feeling no-one asked them to do it - that they wanted to get the car right. The result is a absolutely gorgeous car.

The Porsche still looks vaguely like a Kubelwagen and you get the feeling they didn't have the imagination for anything else. The Porsche is engineered. They spent about 5 minutes in the wind tunnel then bolted on a rear spoiler. When that didn't work they put some motors into the spoiler to raise a section of it when it went above 70mph. They also made it four wheel drive and added the electronic PSM (Porsche Stability Management). This detects when one wheel is losing grip and diverts power from it to the other wheels to compensate. They've left nothing for the driver to do and killed anything you could have enjoyed in it.

The Dodge Viper is a totally different machine. It's like they started with a car that looked butch and gave it a whopping 8.0litre V8. It must sound like the world is coming to an end when it's in the high rev. range. I can't even imagine what the 12.0litre customised Venom would be like. But where you're bound to call the Ferrari "she" on occasion, you're only ever going to call the Viper "it". You'd never love the brutish Viper the way you would the lithe, elegant Ferrari.

There's so many other cars you could mention but they'd all be dismissed so quickly. Lamborghini Diablo - too coarse. Jaguar - too comfort-orientated. Rolls Royce - too damn big. TVR Cerbera - not inspiring enough. Lister Storm - a racing car, not a road car. Mitsubishi EVOvi - same as the Porsche. Honda NSX - oh, so ugly. Corvette - poor man's Viper BMW - poor man's Porsche. Mercedes - poor man's Roll's.

The Ferrari 360 overshadows them all.

Which is why it's such a shame the 360 Spyder (convertible) is so ugly


In case you're wondering - I drive a '91 Fiesta.