BBC Top Gear Sri Lanka - March 2018

The streets of Sri Lanka on the one hand. The Knockhill Race Circuit in Scotland on the other. The weather is schizophrenic, the corners blind and the adrenaline high. And then there are the cars. Thirteen of the best performance cars of the past year gathered for TG UK, plus three of the most anticipated cars to reach Sri Lanka in a decade. All fuelled and ready to go. Balance-of-Power rules don’t apply, meaning that you can be storming around in a supercar and find yourself being harried by a better driver in a hot hatch. Which, given the line-up, is just about possible. Ah yes, the line-up. Everything from supercars to superminis, a hundred-and-some bhp to well over seven hundred. Front-, rear- and four-wheel drive; three, four, five, six, eight and 12 cylinders;
in-lines; and vees.

Fair? Not on paper. But the difference for Speed Week is that this isn’t just a track
test, or a series of zeros and ones that decide statistical wins. After all, there’s no point putting a smile on your face that your heart can’t keep. So after we’ve done the really fast stuff, got loose and scared ourselves a bit, we’ll be heading out onto the roads in our favourite few. Real roads, with real speed limits, ditches and consequences. Out where fast stuff has to deal with the vagaries of random roadbuilding, where performance cars shine and one-trick track ponies get their one-dimensionality exposed. This isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Just a really, really fast one.

Welcome then, to the biggest, baddest roundup of the year: it’s TG’s Speed Week.