Features

Here he is, a gnarled old man at the wheel of a partially fossilised Suzuki SJ410 doing exactly 60kph along a quiet road just outside the Spanish city of Seville. His face is a mass of tan leather engineered by the sun, his bemused frown at the road ahead betraying his failing eyesight, his wandering line betraying his failing steering box. He is not expecting what happens next.

As we round a corner and the road ahead blossoms into a valley-long straight, not an oncoming lorry in sight, I push back my shoulders, pull the left-hand paddle of this Lexus IS-F twice... and floor it.

Everything goes a bit odd, as 417bhp tries to divorce the rear pair of tyres from their comfortable tarmac roost. The Suzuki pings towards the IS-F like its brakes have suddenly jammed on, and the vacuum pipes in the Lexus's Yamaha-fettled engine reach critical mass at 3,600rpm, open some big noisy valve and replace the cultured low-rev Lexus hum with a thick, dangerous-sounding bellow.

I can't see his face clearly, but our dear old chap in the SJ jogs the wheel as the IS-F lunges forward, grabs another gear, shimmies slightly as it touches a dusty median and charges off up the valley like an angry lump of pure evil. A Lexus that makes people flinch because it's so noisy? I like that. I like that a lot.

And it gets better. Because as we pull up in a dirty, rocky little lay-by a couple of miles later, a random string of designations is suddenly spelled out in magnificent metallic 3D: IS-F vs M3 vs C63 vs RS4. Hard not to break out that schoolboy grin, really.

There has been naysaying. Doom and gloom has been preached by the eco-pimps who say that the days of high-horsepower profligacy are over, that fast-for-fast's-sake is like, so 2005. This, I'm pleased to announce, is bollocks.

Today, from a Spanish hillside, I can happily report that horsepower is not dead, it's just grown up a bit and moved to the suburbs.

Spiky-haired, bewinged, bottle-wielding fast-car yobbery might have become unfashionable in the face of a media-friendly threat of global death and its Prius-wielding army, but that doesn't mean to say that the manufacturers have stopped making them. They've just made them brush their hair and polish their shoes.

It is with that in mind that you realise none of these cars looks particularly Rampton day-release, even though each one is fast enough to make your ears clap around the back of your head. So we get subtle(ish) bonnet bulges, wheel arch flares, larger diameter wheels, bigger exhausts and deeper scoops, but no massive spoilers or visually lurid splitters to give the game away. All have put on lean muscle without falling into the caricature styling trap and ending up with a bodybuilder's waddle.

Out of all four, the Lexus with its black wheels, big arches, engine-bay cooling front wheel arch vents and quad-piggyback exhaust tips is the most aggressive.

The C63 is a good thing, a recognisable thing, but not a neon advert. Those half-submerged torpedo-shaped bulges in the bonnet mark the C-Class's potential, but really there's very little anger in it, even though the four exhausts are a little more explicit.

The BMW is similarly restrained, and even though we have the coupe version here, there's something über-normal about it that means while it's easy to overlook, if you linger, there's a wealth of gorgeous performance detail to absorb.

As always, the RS4 tucks away in the background, confident, subtle and muscular, wheel arch flares and distinctive wheels complementing the twin-oval exhausts that state the nature of the V8's business. There isn't much visual pork on any of the cars, and every single one looks the better for it - Bruce Lee rather than Incredible Hulk.

Especially because of the weight of performance they all carry - under fives for the 0-62mph dash and more than 155mph every one, even if they do all have four seats and luggage space for real life, all for early £50k. Those kind of stats put these cars within dreaming distance and make me very happy.