Time was when 400bhp was the preserve of Formula 1 racing cars. These days even prestige estate cars pack this and more but, compared with this unholy quartet, that’s merely a technical achievement. In the ’80s the supercar came of age. This was the decade when power outputs were no longer ‘seasonally adjusted’ by manufacturers. It was also the era that witnessed an all-out top speed war, when it was no longer sufficient to claim your car could reach 200mph. You had to prove it.

The ’80s produced a slide-show succession of homologation specials, one-week wonders and tasteless aftermarket conversions. Few endured with grace but some are deservedly beloved. These four are the real thing – no-word-of-a-lie, no-bets-hedged 400bhp-plus supercars. The Lamborghini Countach heard its own death knell in the ’70s and survived it to become the mighty Quattrovalvole. The Ferrari F40 is the landmark ’80s supercar that made its mark trackside. The Aston Martin V8 Zagato is a bespoke limited edition. And there’s the joker in the pack, the expectation-defying Chevrolet Corvette ZR-1.

It’s an odd and varied mix but, when all the bluff-calling and check-raising is done, there can be only one winner. And the decision will be made at Santa Pod, the UK’s longest-established dragstrip.

Ferrari F40
A truly great car can recalibrate how you feel. First contact with an F40 might you leave you feeling a little light-headed. After all, it does carry 476bhp and was the first genuine production car ever to breach the 200mph barrier (201mph to be precise). Should your initial experience be on a circuit then you will invariably run a gamut of emotions, this boisterous device being astounding, exhausting and exhilarating by turns. But these are mere temporal states. Unless you’re completely hopeless, at some point something clicks in your noggin and the F40 becomes incredibly easy to drive at insane speeds – so long as you think.

All too often the combination of familiarity and predictability breeds indifference but, no matter how many times you drive an F40, you always exit grinning like a loon. Derived from the 288GTO, which was conceived for the ultimately aborted Group B racing category, the F40 was built to take the fight to Porsche’s 959 techno-fest and be finished in time for the marque’s 40th anniversary in 1987. The F40 was intended from the outset as a no-frills racing car for the road: 400 would be made, and they would all be red. Powering the car was a 2936cc variation of the GTO’s twin-turbocharged V8, the dramatic silhouette being the work of Pininfarina’s Leonardo Fioravanti – this being the man who gave the world the Daytona, the 365BB and the 308GTB. Yet here was an altogether different proposition. Geometric of profile where previous Ferrari supercars had been

all sensuous curves, the panels consisted of carbonfibre, Kevlar and aluminium. Thanks to its small frontal area and attention to airflow, the F40 had a drag coefficient of 0.34Cd.

The F40 was the flipside of the GTO coin in that it was designed as a road car as opposed to a track-orientated homologation special; the GT motor sport renaissance was still some years off, after all. The irony here is that it went on to find success on track, much of it after the model had ended production in 1992, by which time 1315 had been made (and not just in rosso). In fact it was giving the much more youthful McLaren F1 a bloody nose as late as ’96. Speed was never the issue, just a lack of reliability. Even now it looks like a gussied-up competition tool, a sense that also pervades the cabin with its proper racing buckets, in-line driving position, non-reflective dash covering and cable doorpulls. There is nothing here that doesn’t need to be. It’s genuinely comfortable, too. You sense that actual thought went into the ergonomics.

The funny thing is, for all the NACA ducts and air vent signifiers, the racer side of the F40’s character is easily subdued. There are no driver aids here or corresponding brain flagellation as you scroll through endless variations of damper setting menus or suchlike. You just turn the key and go – what a concept. Experience informs you that off-boost it’s easy to drive in town despite the heavy clutch and proves much less of a handful than the GTO on a track. Naturally the small matter of 425lb of torque at 4000rpm
can make life interesting, especially in the wet, and it will break traction in fifth. Fortunately its beautifully weighted, unassisted steering is simply the best of any car, ever, while the vented discs have plenty of bite and don’t threaten to fade. The F40 isn’t a monster. Yes, it will spin like a top if you can’t differentiate between steering and braking but it’s just so precise, so agile, that most of the time you’d have to do something pretty stupid to come undone. It’s utterly mesmerising.

This isn’t a poseur’s car. Sure, you could cruise the Kings Road in an F40 but that’s not really its thing. Driving one will not facilitate your passage into the underwear of awestruck supermodels. In fact you’re more likely be collared by camera phone-wielding men of a certain age who will insist on reeling off a list of performance figures. It is simply the most exhilarating road car imaginable and one whose place in Prancing Horse lore is assured, as this was the last Ferrari production car to be personally signed off by Enzo himself. The F40 has its flaws but anyone who has ever attempted to tame one invariably comes away enamoured, taking credit themselves for all this beast of burden does so effortlessly.

Lamborghini Countach QV
You don’t need to have driven one to ‘get’ the Lamborghini Countach Quattrovalvole. It gets you, every single time. It’s only a cliché because it’s true, but this really was the supercar pin-up of all pre-shavers in the ’80s. Few even now engender such anticipation on first sight, although the driving experience renders you a bubbling cauldron of emotions. This is an old-school supercar; one packing 455bhp-worth of trouble.

Legend has it the Countach was so-called because it was the initial utterance by Nuccio Bertone on walking into his studio to be confronted with Marcello Gandini’s full-scale outline for the car. This Piedmontese slang translates, we’re told, to something along the lines of ‘Gor blimey, that’s a radical-looking thing and no mistake.’ Only shorter. And trailed by an exclamation mark. You can imagine the reaction to the original show queen’s unveiling at the 1971 Geneva Salon. Following the Miura was always going to be a tough gig for Lamborghini, and for the Bertone styling house, but they pulled it off. If the Miura represented Year Zero for supercars, the Countach was the jumping-off point.

When viewed as a piece of automotive weaponry, it still ticks a lot of boxes. Quite aside from the outer drama, its all-alloy, quad-cam V12 is a gem, this Giotto Bizzarrini-conceived, Gian Paolo Dallara-refined classic being for so long a marque constant. Here mounted longitudinally (instead of transversely, as in the Miura), it’s a remarkable piece of packaging: the gearbox sits ahead of the engine, which means it’s within the wheelbase, along with the fuel tanks and water radiators. And while a degree of bovine excrement followed the Countach’s performance claims in the early days, the QV was an honest-to-God 180mph-plus supercar. Arriving in 1985 boasting 5167cc (previously 4.8 litres) and new cylinder heads devised by former Maserati man Giulio Alfieri, it took the fight to Ferrari’s recently introduced Testarossa. And how.

Even now, experiencing a QV is freighted with wonder. There’s an intensity to old supercars that is alien to the modern stuff. This isn’t a criticism. Quite the opposite in fact, as you feel you’re actually driving the Countach. And when you get it right here, there’s a feeling of accomplishment. Thing is, the Countach is simply horrible when dawdling, each prod of the clutch in traffic plaiting your hamstrings. For all the brilliance of the mechanical layout, the gearbox location intrudes into the cabin, as do the wheelwells. The pedals almost overlap and the steering wheel damn near rests on your lap. And there’s little headroom. All of which combines to skewer the desired driving stance. It’s a mite compromised.

Having said all that, the Countach is surprisingly tractable, with ballistic acceleration and a linear torque spread. It really does pull from low down the rev range and the seismic boom as six twin-choke downdraught Webers suck and gurgle is enthralling. It gets better the faster you go, with an unexpected sense of refinement over bumpy topography. At low three-figure speeds a QV is arrow-straight, with no tramlining and little discernible front-end lift. The brakes are powerful and progressive, the steering communicative and the dogleg ’box meaty but with a clearly defined shift action. With familiarisation you won’t grandma a gearchange.

Ultimately, it’s the seating position that lets it down. And, as we all know by rote, you can’t see out of it, reversing being a deep breath and guesstimate chore. But let’s not belittle an icon here. The Miura was barely five years old when the Countach first broke cover. The concept of a supercar was still new. Against a backdrop of internal turmoil, changes of ownership and political strife – not to mention an oil crisis – Lamborghini created a car that was legendary the moment it was born. The addition of a 48-valve ’head simply maintained the model’s relevance as it reached middle-age. It’s just a pity the model subsequently became a caricature heaped over with ‘Elvis: the Vegas years’ levels of vulgarity: the last-of-line 25th Anniversary edition really was ghastly.

Some say the Countach is the pantomime dame of supercars; all tinsel and bluster. But as drag artists go, a QV flexing its pecs is still not to be trifled with. Believe it.

Aston Martin V8 Zagato
To most onlookers the Aston Martin V8 Zagato honours the DB4GTZ of the early ’60s but possesses little of its substance. It wasn’t born with competition in mind, nor is it unspeakably gorgeous. Whereas its ’60s antecedent was as elegant as it was simple, here the Milanese styling house somehow flubbed the gold standard of ’80s cash cows, with the limited production run selling out based only on preliminary renderings. Yet its importance in Aston Martin history – to the continued existence of this perennial coffin-dodger – shouldn’t be underestimated.

Consider this: when unleashed in the mid-1980s this was the fastest-ever production Aston and packed a thumping 435bhp. Some 10% lighter than the regular ‘Towns’ V8 Vantage on which it was based, it was also more aerodynamic (0.33Cd rather than 0.38Cd), and one of few cars in-period that could go toe-to-toe with the Ferrari 288GTO and Porsche 959 on outright pace. Even now it’s epically fast in a nose-up, tail-squatting sort of way.

Backpedal to March 1984 and Aston principal Victor Gauntlett had a meeting of minds with Elio and Gianni Zagato at the Geneva motor show. With interest in the ‘wedge’ Lagonda on the wane, and sales of the Neolithic V8 flatlining, a new ‘boutique’ limited edition would reawaken interest in a marque that seemed destined for the embalming table. By the November a deal was done for the production of 50 custom-bodied Astons, with the first chassis being completed in the Works Service department in January ’85.
A model was shown in Geneva two months later: interest was at fever pitch. The money-up-front approach to development worked a treat, for each slot in the queue came after a £15,000 deposit.

But when the car finally appeared in ’86, Giuseppe Mittino’s original outline had morphed into something altogether less lovely. The price, too, ballooned out of all proportion: from £87,000 to a whopping £145,000 when production ended in ’88. Nonetheless, Gauntlett followed it with 37 Volante ragtops. The V8 Zagato has its fans today, although it remains grossly unappreciated.

Up close, the corporate grille, flanked by Renault 11-sourced headlights, doesn’t really work and the cliché double-bubble roof seems oddly muted here. But it’s largely shorn of overhangs (it’s 16in shorter than a regular V8 Vantage and has a 7% smaller frontal area) and the glass and doorhandles are flush so as not to interrupt airflow. The only element that really grates is the cutaway drop section in the door glazing, which is very Subaru SVX. Without the glassfibre front spoiler its drag coefficient would drop to an impressive 0.29Cd, but it’s in place for a reason.

Step inside, and all ye olde reference points expected of an Aston are gone, replaced by an angular instrument binnacle that echoes the shape of the grille. There is no timber, just Jaguar switchgear, Vauxhall Astra column stalks and old-school floor-mounted pedals. It’s extremely comfortable, has a real-world driving position and excellent visibility. The view ahead is, however, dominated by the Linford Christie of power bulges. Plans initially called for fuel injection but this Anglo-Italian crossbreed emerged with four gurgling Webers atop its 5.3-litre bent eight.

Period stats talked of 186mph outright and a 0-60mph time of 4.8sec. It feels faster. You really need to get the car moving before you stand on the throttle as there’s 395lb ft of torque being transmitted through the heavily burdened clutch. You cannot believe that something this big can move so quickly, the accompanying bellow being unlike that proffered by any other Aston. The carbs cough and spit but it sounds glorious, rearing up on the overrun as you change up on the dogleg ZF five-speeder. It’s surprisingly adept cross-country and, while the car doesn’t exactly shrink around you, the steering is nicely weighted with just 2.9 turns lock-to-lock. It also rolls less than you might imagine. However, your assumption that the vented discs will arrest 1590kg is blindsided the moment you lean on them a second time.

There is nothing subtle about this car but it is magnificent in its own way. And if you think the styling is controversial, you should have seen Zagato’s pitch for an ’80s Lagonda…  

Chevrolet Corvette ZR1
In this company, bringing a Corvette to anything other than a dragstrip is much like taking a knife to a gunfight. ‘America’s Only Sports Car’ has never really been taken seriously in Europe. Every few years there’s a big push, some marketing prinkle at GM talking up projected sales figures in the thousands and a sustained challenge to the best performance hardware from ‘Yurup’ on their turf. Then sales fail to stretch much beyond double figures and the ’Vette is quietly withdrawn to regroup and lick its wounds.

Call it cultural imperiousness, but it’s hard to take any Corvette  seriously anywhere outside its homeland. It’s all flambéed rear skins and lots of noise. Well that’s one school of thought. Experience of the mighty ZR-1 might just change your mind. It may be a low-totem fixture in the supercar firmament but it really is super in just about every quantifiable sense. Packing 375bhp or 405bhp depending on spec, this isn’t your average Corvette. But mega-number horsepower stats barely scratch the surface. Conceived at a time when Chevrolet represented charisma-free, uninspiring and orthodox grot-boxes, the ZR-1 was a heaven-sent halo product.

The C4 Corvette was a better car than history paints it. Beneath the glassfibre ’shell sat a capable chassis, poorly served by low-output V8s that were often manacled to slow-witted slushboxes with a sedative effect on outright urge. It was left to outside tuners to exploit the underpinnings fully, with Reeves Callaway’s eponymous creations taking on factory sanction for a brief spell. There was clearly a market for an in-house, explicitly performance-orientated version – and GM had the brains to pull it off.

Conceived during Lotus’s GM custodianship, the plucky British minnow was a logical engineering partner when thoughts turned to creating the ultimate ’Vette. Turbocharged V6s were considered, as were variations of the existing small-block V8, but each option was batted away for not being in keeping with the ‘ultimate’ mantra. Under the guidance of engineering deity Tony Rudd, an all-new 32-valve quad-cam V8 was created from scratch, with Chevrolet’s own boffins taking care of the rest of this brave new world. With a six-speed ZF ’box, electronic ride system and all manner of other newfangled doohickeys, this was state-of-the-art stuff. Launched at the 1989 Geneva motor show, sales began the following year with a premium price tag: ,995. It was an outrageous sum for a Chevy, yet some punters paid considerably over the odds to be first on the block with ‘The King of the Hill’.

Some 6939 ZR-1s were made to ’95 and, while there have since been more powerful Corvettes, few can match this one for sheer exhilaration. But while the words ‘understated’ and ‘Corvette’ rarely belong in the same sentence, it’s almost the Q-car of this quartet. There are few clues that it’s anything other than a regular edition, the most obvious signifier being the concave slab panel with its four square(ish) taillights in place of the usual round ones. And this layout was subsequently adopted on less outré editions.

Inside, the cabin comes as a bit of a disappointment, with way too much low-rent plastic ever to fully convince. But it is very comfortable, you can see out of it without having to contort yourself to a neck-cricking angle, and there’s usable stowage space. It’s real-world practical and very much a Chevrolet product after all. What really gives the game away is the key-operated ‘Valet Switch’, which cuts down power to a mere 250bhp. You don’t want some pizza-faced throttle-jockey killing himself in your car, after all.

And is it fast! The factory claimed a top speed of 180mph and sub-5.0sec 0-60mph times. What impresses more is the seamless power delivery. Acceleration is relentless, changing up at 6500rpm being unthinkable in a regular pushrod V8. You can feel the torque swell (370lb ft at 4000rpm) as those fat rear Goodyears scrabble to find purchase. Prior experience tells you the ZR-1 doesn’t fall over the moment it arrives at a corner. It’s all very measured, without the usual plough-on understeer or weight transfer shenanigans.
It’s a polished performer, a product of Bowling Green, Kentucky, that kicks most strange-sounding ‘furrin’ sporty cars into touch. America rules (with a little help from Norfolk).

Conclusion
Those looking for an objective, evidence-based conclusion should look away now. The Ferrari is the best car here. Not best in any measurable sense, you understand. More that it would be the best car in any grouping even if it were SUVs. Passion overruns logic where the F40 is concerned. Sure, it’s not terribly well made but it’s an ’80s Ferrari. Build quality was for Porsche. It’s also not very practical but you wouldn’t use one for the daily commute, although there’s nothing to stop you from doing so.

Off-boost, it’s easy to drive so long as you don’t go near any width-restrictions. Or sleeping policemen.
The Countach, on the other hand, is a pig to drive slowly and Great Britain is simply too small to contain it. Given sufficient space it’s worth having, just to hear its feral howl at peak revs, which redefines your understanding of loudness. And with no filter between brain and mouth you’ll be swearing like a navvy with each incremental rise in decibels. It has that effect.

The Aston is onto a loser in this company because it’s a bit too obscure to be an icon, but therein lies much of its appeal. It’s a Zagato product and all which that entails. It’s also mind-bogglingly quick for a car of such tonnage, and genuinely enjoyable to hustle on B-roads. And it has the second-best engine note here (the Countach wins this competition hands down).

Which leaves the Corvette. It’s easy to dismiss the Chevy – easy but wrong. We defy anyone not to be impressed by the ZR-1. That it’s supercar quick isn’t what surprises; more the unexpected sense of refinement. That and the fact that the car pictured here could be yours for £18,000. If logic was allowed to rule the day, and values were factored in, it would bash the other three cars hollow. But we don’t really ‘do’ logic so the F40 wins. Shock.