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Early morning mist hangs over a scene that has to have remained all but unchanged for centuries. Flocks of rooks and seagulls jostle over rolling downland fields, as plough blades struggle to carve their way through hoar frost-topped clods of earth.

Suddenly, the birds scatter, their primitive yet sharply primed instincts sensing the approach of intruders to their environment.

Two streaks of scarlet split the calm, following the contours of a valley like cruise missiles on a atellite-guided journey towards the destruction of some unseen target.

As they charge along in unison, a wall of sound comes barrelling on behind, a deep thrum joined by an altogether more vicious sonic boom.

Freeze-frame this moment and their identities can be unravelled. Here are two of the most anticipated cars of the year; one, a brutal hyper saloon, the other a precision focused coupe.

A pair of German cars that are setting soft compound rubber on UK tarmac for the very first time: the Audi RS4 and Porsche Cayman S.

Zoom right in and the Audi surges forwards first. Barking and rumbling like it's just been dropped from air jacks and pushed out of a pit garage, the RS4 roughly forces its way through the frozen air.

That deep-jawed, matt aluminium-fringed grille, together with the multiple cooling ducts and the pumped-up wheelarches, is a defiant warning of what this car's all about.

Focus closer and we're inside, pushing hard and holding on tight. The transformation to a £49,980 sub-supercar has brought with it an interior covering of aluminium, black leather and deeply lacquered carbon-fibre.

It's dark, as in menacing, in here, which is a wholly appropriate sensation given this car's technical potential.

Motivation comes from a carbon-fibre and bright-red-alloy finished 4.2-litre V8, using the same FSI direct injection hardware as Audi's Le Mans dominating R8 race cars to deliver a frankly staggering set of statistics.

Try 414bhp at a peak of 7,800rpm and 317lb ft at 5,500rpm, with 90 per cent of that torque accessible all the way from 2,250rpm right through to 7,600rpm. Keep your right foot in and the brain-bruising propulsion won't let up until the 8,250rpm redline nears. In road cars, you just don't get V8s that rev so ferociously.