FIVE STARS

It's been the sports car class leader for over two decades, but can rivals from Alpine, BMW, Ford and Lotus finally take the lead over Porsche's Boxster?

- by JAMES TAYLOR

YOU MAY REMEMBER IN EVO'S FEBRUARY 2024 issue we got together almost every hot hatch on sale in the UK for one big summit meeting test. There were 18 cars (sales of Audi's S3 and RS3 were temporarily paused to make way for the arrival of facelifted versions, so call it 20 in spirit). Today, in mid2025, that same test would include in the region of 13 cars.

What we have here is a similar test for sports cars: a cross-section of the market in one place at one time. The picture isn't quite as pessimistic as the five cars you see gathered here: whereas our hot hatch test took in nearly every ICE and hybrid variant on the market, this test concentrates on the sports car world's heartland middle-ground.

In the lowlands, Mazda's evergreen and everbrilliant MX-5 still abides (though it's less affordable than it once was, starting from £28,285). At the niche end Caterham and Morgan and smaller cottage-industry firms are still creating captivating cars. And at the higher end, there's certainly no shortage of supercars and super-GTs.

But in the more mainstream middle, it's a pretty compact cross-section. The Toyota Supra is no longer on sale in the UK, though its soft-top BMW Z4 cousin continues.

Toyota's brilliant GR86 has likewise gone, cut off in its prime by a combination of ADAS, emissions and other regulatory beartraps. Just as pure EVs were omitted from the hot hatch test, so too we've decided not to include the MG Cyberster here.

We'll drive the cars that are here back-toback, reflect on the sports car market as it stands, and choose the best - it is a group test, after all. It would have been a group test of fixed-head coupes but Porsche was temporarily without a non-GT-department six-cylinder 718 Cayman on its test fleet, so our Fast Fleet 718 Boxster GTS long-termer gamely leapt off the subs bench to take part - and provide a flat-six foil to the V6 Lotus Emira, with a near-400bhp power output.