Top Gear's Top 9: cars created by one person's vision

The F1 was the fastest road legal car ever when unveiled in 1992, but its three-seat layout came from a sketch Gordon Murray had penned in college in the 1960s. Murray’s manifesto for the F1 included an obsession with weight reduction and tactility.

Mizuno-san was hand-picked by Carlos Ghosn to be the chief engineer and project manager of the R35 GT-R. A man obsessed by detail and with a background in Group C endurance racing (having started working at Nissan in 1972), he wanted to bring supercar performance to the masses.

Simon Saunders worked as a car designer for Porsche, Aston and GM, but in the 1990s he turned his dream of building a ‘new Lotus 7’ into a reality. Launched in 1999, the Atom was built to take advantage of the growing track day market.

It’s a story that has been twisted by time (and murdered by the 2022 film Lamborghini: The Man Behind The Legend), but Ferruccio Lamborghini did genuinely start building sports cars because of clutch issues with his Ferraris. The V12-engined 350GT was unveiled at the 1964 Geneva Motor Show. The rest is history.

In 1997, while on the Shinkansen express train between Tokyo and Nagoya, Ferdinand Piëch sketched an idea for an 18-cylinder engine. Seeking a brand to match, the VW chairman missed out on Rolls-Royce but purchased Bugatti and drove its relocation back to Molsheim. The Veyron did end up with only 16 cylinders though.

The fact that he has two cars on this list might give you a sense of what Piëch was like. There could have been three had we included the Phaeton, but the XL1 is cooler. The Austrian long wanted to build a ‘one litre car’ capable of travelling 100 kilometres on one litre of fuel. The diesel-hybrid XL1 was that car, with an official WLTP of 313mpg.

With the 1956 Suez Crisis resulting in a fuel shortage in the UK, the British Motor Corporation (BMC) needed a small, efficient car to sell to the masses. Alec Issigonis had recently been brought back to BMC by Sir Leonard Lord, and he’d go on to design the tiny icon with a transverse engine and a FWD layout that maximised interior space.

Dante Giocosa joined Fiat in 1927 and was the man behind the 500 Topolino and the Nuova 500. Later in his career (and spurred on by the Mini’s design) he created the 128, which still sets the template for front-wheel drive cars today.

After retiring from racing, Carroll Shelby decided that America was missing a proper V8 sports car that was affordable and could be driven all week before being raced on the weekend. Enter Brit carmaker AC. Somehow, Shelby fitted a 4.3-litre Ford V8 into the Ace and then set about dominating sports car racing.