The Renault Mégane R26.R carved its place in eCoty history not only through its extraordinary cross-country pace, but also by feeling as special and rewarding to drive as vastly more expensive and specialised high performance machinery – all the time and not just flat out. This year’s hottest hatch isn’t as light, as extreme or as track-orientated but it does have 300bhp, Revoknuckle front suspension geometry to ensure it doesn’t go to waste, something approaching supercar levels of presence and colour-keyed Recaros that lock you into a maximum-attack mindset as surely as they clamp your torso in place when the g-force ramps up. It’s a Focus ST’s meaner, madder big brother and the lairiest RS since the Sierra Cossie.

As we’ve found in various road tests and with our long-termer, familiar roads seem shorter, bumpier and more exciting in the Focus RS. We’re expecting the less familiar ones of Skye to be dispatched with similarly brutal haste but little conspicuous finesse. Despite Revoknuckle, there will be torque steer, though less than you might expect 324lb ft to generate. The RS isn’t the last word in steering feel, either. The compensation is a motherload of the stuff that gets things done: grunt, grip and traction. The amount of adhesion and drive the Focus musters out of bends is, at first, hard to get your head around. Likewise the speed it heads off down the next straight. It’s the way the Focus packages its power on the move that gives it such remarkable real-world pace.

Non top-five verdict
One place above the Jaguar is a car to which you couldn’t apply the term polished. Harris loved the Focus RS but most of us nodded our heads when Vivian said ‘it feels a bit unnatural and it doesn’t flow like the Clio. You kind of bludgeon the road into submission’.