Suspension bridge

Lurking beneath the surface of most mechanical engineers you'll find a latent boy (or girl) racer, but until fairly recently this is where it had to stay.

This thirst for speed can be slaked by the increasing popularity of track days, where you drive your car to the track and jostle with other weekend warriors for your 15 minutes of fame.

At best this is an unhappy compromise. Road cars don't go round tracks very well without modification. And if you've modified your car for the circuit then the road experience is very uncomfortable. Family and friends rarely appreciate the nuances of superior 'ride and handling' that stiffened suspension can provide.

So to do the track day experience properly you had to have a track car as well — until now. Lotus has introduced the Exige S, 'the fastest accelerating product car in the world' (with the exception of the Ferrari F430 that beats it by a whisker — but then it is nearly four times the price).