Category: Exotic Sports 
Price Range: £79,825 to £99,580
Massive punch, still easy to drive, good value.
Not pretty enough, no rear seats, badge lacks cachet.
The finest sub-£100k supercar on sale
The R8 V10 is so civilised, so easy and so cultured as a device to go about your daily business, be it cruising on a motorway or sitting in commuter traffic, that it's remarkably easy to forget about the vast amounts of power available. But when you do open it up, you'll be left in no doubt at all that you are in the company of that rarest of fast car breeds: a car capable of hitting 62mph in under 4sec. It needs just another 8sec to be travelling at 125mph, and given enough space will take you all the way to 196mph.
It is a definitive upgrade: none of us thought the V8 motor was exactly sluggish with the 414bhp it had on tap, but those two extra cylinders add over 100bhp to the total, bringing it to 517bhp, in a car weighing just 65kg extra.
The engine develops peak power at 8000rpm, but you don't need to change gear until 8700rpm, yet it generates 80% of its maximum torque at idling speed, giving the R8 V10 one of the very widest powerbands of any car on sale.
As before, power is fed predominately through the rear wheels, but with up to 35% available to be used by the front wheels when conditions command. The same gearboxes as before - a six speed manual or, for an extra £5080, a six speed automatic, have been retained.
To be fair, others can be bought for similar money that will do no less: the almost identically priced Porsche 911 Turbo springs most readily to mind but the Porsche engine sounds nowhere near as good as the R8's remarkable V10 engine and it only the 911 Turbo only provides its power in short, sharp shocks. The R8's powerband is so wide that you can tackle the length of any British A or B road extremely effectively simply by selecting third gear and leaving it there.
As mentioned you can do this either with a paddle or a gearlever, but we incline towards the cheaper, more satisfying manual as the semi-automatic system is not nearly as smooth or sophisticated as the double clutch transmission you can now buy on a diesel Ford Focus. Likewise, you can spend £6995 equipping your R8 with carbon ceramic brakes only to find they don't slow the car notably more quickly but do provide an overly light middle pedal.
One question in search of an answer was how the extra power of the V10 would affect the handling of the R8: even a small amount of extra weight in the wrong place could play havoc with a car as finely balanced as this. In the event, although the V10 R8 is perhaps not so forgiving as the V8 version, you'd have to be driving it faster and on a private track to really notice the difference. In all normal use, the V10 R8 is as sweet, agile, communicative and faithful as its little sister. Which means that, at this price point, it is unrivalled.
