The great debate: the best car of the past 25 years

SC: I brought my own A110 today. It fits an interesting gap between a Mazda MX-5 and a Porsche 911. And it’s still a Renault, so when you get it serviced, it’s £400 instead of £1400. Because of the mid-engine layout, it has nice balance and steering. I’ve owned nine Lotuses and they were all light and delicate in their handling – and this is the best ‘Lotus’ of them all.

RB: It feels defining because it’s so different from what everyone else was doing. It’s almost anachronistic: here was this pure driver’s car in a world of SUVs and fancy technology.

SC: It could have failed, couldn’t it? It’s quite similar to the Alfa Romeo 4C in outlook.

MT: Has it actually worked? We love it, but you don’t see many of them. It’s like Mini again: will they ever better their first car, and can they make a brand out of it? You look at what’s coming from Alpine and all I see is slightly faster, slightly heavier Renaults.

MP: It’s like the Polestar 1: it’s different from the other cars the brand is going to launch. The first car is one for engineers to do their thing on. Nobody’s expecting it to make any money, so they just get away with it.

JA: When the A110 was launched, I’m not sure they had plans for it as a brand, but because it was successful, they wanted to do something – but they didn’t know what.

SC: I didn’t buy that car viewing it as part of a family; I just liked it. I’ve done a couple of track days in it, and even on basic suspension you can, if you’re good enough, do a bloke in a Porsche Cayman, which is fun. I intend to hold on to it, because it’s light and it has a simple, effective engine that sounds good.

JA: Most of us turned up in a car that was pioneering. Mark, you rocked up in a Volkswagen Golf…

MT: The Mk7 Golf represents as close to perfection as you can get in a mainstream car. It’s the result of some serious engineering power: it’s based on the MQB platform, on which 40 million cars have been built, and 40 million more will use it into the 2030s. It represents the engineering might of the VW Group at its biggest. I’ve brought a facelifted GTI, which is the Golf at its sweetest.