World F1 racing champion, Fernando Alonso, has recently taken delivery of his company car from his new employers, the McLaren racing team. The car is a Mercedes-McLaren SLR 722, a special development of the SLR with more power and a stiffer suspension. If you want one, you will only need in the region of half a million dollars.

For your money you’d get one of the more civilized supercars around. It has been praised for its comfort and handling and is considerably more luxuriously finished than most of its competition. The downside is a weight penalty but, with 650 bhp to play with, performance is still far more than is legal in most states. Keep that foot off the gas if you want to avoid a whole string of speeding tickets.

It’s a mean-looking brute from the front and I’m not entirely convinced by the attempt to combine the traditional Mercedes elements with the swooping lines of a supercar. But, from the side, it suddenly looks just right.

I’m sure Alonso will enjoy driving to work in his new car but it’s not really to my taste. Something a little less ostentatious for me, I think.

Time to look at my favorite dream car - the Ferrari 250 GTO. I may do several posts on this one as it is, to my eyes, the most beautiful car ever made. And I am not alone in this assessment - for decades this car has been the most desirable of all classic cars, as reflected in its current going price of around $6 million. In 1991, one was sold for $15 million.

A development of the earlier 250 GT SWB, the 250 GTO was designed from the outset for racing and used a 3.0 liter V12 engine. Only 39 were made, considerably short of the required homologation requirement of 100, but it was allowed to race anyway. It won the World GT Championship in 1962, 1963 and 1964, which certainly argues for its effectiveness as a racer.

But it was its looks that made it so desirable. Perfect in proportion, partly thanks to its being one of the last competitive front-engined GT racers, nothing about it is overdone or out of place. The design was largely the work of Bizzarini and Scaglietti but others worked on it too after Bizzarini fell out with Enzo Ferrari and was fired. In a way, it is fitting that no one designer can lay claim to it, it being such a perfect expression of the supremacy of Italian design at the time.

But enough of my prattle - just feast your eyes on the most gorgeous of all dream cars and we can talk about details in some other post.

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.