There is one passion that ignites the British into foolhardy action like no other, and that’s ‘sport’. To combat the stupefying boredom of everyday life the British have come up with some quite ridiculous pastimes in order to amuse themselves. Take rugby, a game played by gentlemen who behave like savage hooligans. Skiing, anyone? Yep, a Brit stuck a few poles into the snow and persuaded his friends to race each other down the steep slope to see who could break both ankles along the way. How about hurling a rock-hard leather-clad ball at 80mph at a hapless batsman? The British have devised competition in many challenging guises. Americans, on the other hand, have taken girls’ sports such as netball and rounders to the extreme…

The advent of the motor car was a great opportunity for competition, speed, danger and broken limbs. The French held the first actual motor race in 1894, yet that was a slow, 80-mile endurance run, won by a steam engine. American Gordon Bennett Jr established his own event in 1900, but the British built the first proper race track at Brooklands in 1907 and held the first Formula 1 Grand Prix at Silverstone in 1950.

With the arrival of the automobile the British quickly added ‘sports’ to ‘car’ with the 1910 Vauxhall 20hp, regarded as the first, pure such machine. Since then, sports cars have been synonymous with Britain. Not always the best – some German and Italian examples have proved better engineered over the years – they have always provided driving enjoyment. So what does the varied septet tested over the following pages tell us?

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