AS AUTOMOTIVE RITES OF PASSAGE GO, OWNING A mid-engined car has to be right up there with the best. Make it a mid-engined supercar and there’s surely little to touch it.
For many decades, whether you were buying new or used, it almost certainly meant buying Italian, which exposed you to engine-out servicing for everything but emptying the ashtrays. Thankfully in more recent years the genre has moved on, with models becoming more diverse, more reliable, more useable and – crucially for attainability – far more numerous.
Such abundance has transformed the used market, as has the growing network of excellent specialists to maintain them at less than main dealer rates. As a result the mid-engined supercar dream has become viable for more of us than ever before. It’s certainly a nice thought to entertain. But which cars to consider?
Well, you couldn’t have a mid-engined supercar test without a Ferrari, and the F430 nicely blurs the boundary between classic and modern. Stick-shift cars are rare and command a significant premium, so we’ve gone with the far more abundant F1 paddleshift model, values of which seem to sit somewhere between £75,000 and £85,000 for good useable examples. Spiders seem far more numerous in the classifieds than berlinettas, but we’ve gone with the latter because we’re coupe kinda guys.
For many the supercar fantasy is very definitely a Raging Bull and not a Prancing Horse. We chose a Gallardo LP560-4 because it’s more of a plug-and-play proposition than the early 5-litre cars, the original Lambo V10 being potentially more problematic and needing more TLC than the later Audi-fied 5.2-litre ten-banger. As with the F430 there seems to be at least four Spyders for sale for every coupe, but when you do find a tin-top the pricing is in a similar ballpark to the F430.
Special editions such as the rear-drive Balboni are too expensive and too hard to find, especially the handful that were spec’d with a manual gearbox. This is no bad thing because it means we’ll be revisiting two of the more formative single-clutch paddleshift transmissions. Cutting-edge in their day, will progress throw unflattering light on these sequential manuals?
Audi’s R8 has always been something of an interloper. Especially the V10 FSI, which combined a truly exotic powertrain with reassuring Teutonic sensibilities and the ruthless resolve so typical of the Piech-led VW-Audi
