Enough of supercars - let’s be a little more practical. In England through the seventies the dream car that was within reach was the Triumph Dolomite Sprint. It wasn’t much to look at, the body originating from a Michelotti design of the sixties, but it was inoffensive at least and packed some grunt in the engine compartment.

Powered by a two liter slant-4 engine with 16 valves, the Sprint was quicker than anything in its price range and had the added advantage of four doors, allowing one to plead, “But dear, it’s a family saloon!” That didn’t stop it getting to 115 mph as its top speed and to 60 mph in 8.5 seconds, however.

That was good enough to beat its contemporaries, the BMW 2002 and the Alfa Romeo 2000, both of which would make a bigger dent in your wallet. The Sprint became the dream of the boy racers who did not want to go the more common Ford Escort RS1600 route.

And the real racers picked up on it too, lowering the suspension to improve handling and coaxing even more power from its advanced engine. For many years the Leyland Team Sprints were a familiar sight in National saloon car races.

The Sprint approaches classic status in Britain now, the last one having rolled off the production line in 1979. Triumph are long gone, swallowed up in the Leyland debacle that eventually emerged as Rover Cars, but the Sprint lives on in the memory as one of the most desirable all-rounders ever built.

I was wandering the net the other day when I came across BusinessWeek Online’s list of the best American cars. This caught my eye:

I don’t usually talk about supercars in this blog but the Saleen is a special case, being American. The company produces several Ford-based models, variants of the Focus and Mustang, but the S7 is top of the range and a match for any European supercar. It may not have a V12 but its 7 liter V8 produces 750 bhp, more than enough to see off the competition.

As far as looks goes, the S7 easily holds its own too. It has that classic mid-engined style that is so easy on the eye whatever the decade. Admittedly, it suffers a bit from “intake obsession” but the basic lines are so good that this does not detract. It’s a design worthy of any Italian styling house.

With that amount of power the S7 delivers in performance terms too; it is reputed to be the fastest production car of all at the moment and hits 60 mph in 2.8 seconds. That’s serious motoring.

Naturally, the company races the S7 and it won the LMES race at Spa in May this year. That’s against the best opposition Europe can put up and on one of their classic circuits too.

The Saleen is the best American foray into the supercar league in years. If you want to learn more, or even place an order (a mere $580,000 will get you the S7), have a look at the company’s website. It’s a Flash tour de force, of course, with music, videos and interviews - well worth a look.

Recently it was announced that the Formula One racing team, Midland MF1, had been bought by a Dutch company, Spyker, a manufacturer of exclusive sports cars for the very rich. Not having noticed the company before, I had a look at their website to see what sort of cars they make.

It was a bit of a shock at first. I stumbled upon an SUV that must surely be one of the ugliest cars of the year. And then I found the C8 Double 12 S, a sports car that, while obviously put together by craftsmen, leaves something to be desired in the prettiness stakes.

The open version, the C12 LaTurbie is rather better, perhaps because any fewer intakes are bound to improve the car’s looks.

The name “Spyker” was nagging at me, however, and it was not until I read the history of the company that I realized why. It’s the name of a very old Dutch car manufacturer that ceased trading long ago and I must have read about it at some time. The new company is a recent rebirth, having been started in 2000. It is intended to emulate the original company in producing only quality products and this shows in the workmanship that goes into the cars.

But there was another memory that still had to surface. Spyker have been running entries in the FIA sports car formula and have done quite well. Their latest cars, here photographed at Le Mans, look pretty good.

Any new manufacturer in the world of automobiles is of interest, now that such start-ups are rare, and Spyker seem to be headed towards success. Have a look at their website and see what you think.

TVR is a small car manufacturer now known for producing some of the most ferocious production cars imagineable. But there was a time when they had one product, the Grantura, that was fairly typical of British sports cars of the fifties and sixties in that it was supplied with an engine no larger than 2 liters. It also followed tradition in being enormous fun to drive. Where it differed from so many other sports cars was in its looks - it was quite pretty.

A bit upright in stance, the Grantura yet manages to look like a miniature Gran Turismo car - a poor man’s supercar, perhaps. The original design for the rear was somewhat old-fashioned but, in the sixties, they chopped off the tail and made it a lot more fashionable. With that abrupt cut-off and the addition of the inevitable Ford Cortina rear light clusters, the car was given a new lease of life.

Also in the sixties, Jack Griffith, an American motor dealer, squeezed a Ford 4.7 liter V8 under the bonnet and suddenly the Grantura had muscle. It is in Jack’s honor that the later TVR Griffith is named. The little car must have been quite a handful with that much power available but it was to set the trend for all later TVRs.

By the end of the decade, TVR had set their sights much higher and began a line of very powerful and fast sports cars that eventually made the company famous. But I still have a soft spot for the old Grantura. Without it, we would never have seen such monsters as the Tuscan, the Chimaera and the Cerbera.