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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.

The main event is, of course, the IS-F. And, boy,is it an early adopter's dream. The 5.0-litre V8 is the same block as in the LS600h, except without the 'h' bit and with input from Yamaha to make it more intrusive. Yamaha is famous for two things: bikes and pianos, so tuning is obviously its thing.

There are other things going on to wring that 417bhp and 373lb ft of torque out of the block, but suffice to say this is about as far from a Buick 302 as an F1 car is from a bicycle. It's also mated to a version of the LS's eight-speed auto, but with an ultra-quick paddleshift.

Direct drive gives a shift time of 100 milliseconds, and yet when you pop it back into 'comfort', it also has the slushy loveliness of a premium auto. Gently toddle about in 'D', and really you'd have very little concept of what the IS-F is really all about.

Yup, there's a neat set of racy, blue-lit dials, some sporty seats and a nicely finished dash, but it doesn't exactly shout that it's going to nail your head to the back windscreen when you push the 'Sport' button on the right of the steering wheel and progress the right-hand pedal past a quarter travel.

It rides almost supernaturally well, and it has the defined isolatory vibe and pottering-speed awesomeness of little brother IS250, including steering that is so dead in the middle, I thought my fingers had gone numb.

The Mercedes C63 AMG, on the other hand, sounds simpler in theory, if not in execution. Here's a huge 457bhp, 6.3-litre V8 with 442lb ft of torque, in a relatively small car, driving the rear wheels through a seven-speed, paddle-override auto with a super-aggro shift pattern if you prod and twist the requisite knobs.

The steering is pin-sharp and prone to kickback on the broken Spanish tarmac, the seats are deep, hip- and haunch-throttling buckets, and the delivery from that engine is both too much for the rear tyres in most situations and one of the most life-affirming bits of machinery I've ever encountered.

It's not an easy car to drive fast, to be honest. You don't relax with it, or ever calm down enough to get your heart rate down below imminent-heart-attack levels. In fact, the C63 can be especially cruel on these fast, sweeping Spanish roads that often chuck in desperately unsettling craters mid-corner, or a big lump somewhere uncompromising.

The C63 is so stiff, that at one point, braking down from a fast straight into a 35mph left, the car hit a bump and I hit the roof. Travelling quickly on a very bumpy, treacherously cambered road like this in a C63 is not for the faint of heart, or the particularly sound of head.

The overridden seven-speed auto also feels desperately clunky next to the Lexus, and nowhere near as sweet as either of the manuals. Bizarrely for an auto AMG, this actually feels more like a racing car than any of the others here. Getting it right is harder, because you can't just jump on the throttle - with the traction control switched on, the little blinky orange light stutters your progress; with it switched off, injudicious throttle-stampings will result in you force-feeding a Merc into a tree.