Wheels 70 greatest cars

SEVEN DECADES FROM WHICH TO CHOOSE...IT WAS A MAMMOTH UNDERTAKING, SO HOW DID WE GO? LET THE ARGUMENTS BEGIN...

- ANDY ENRIGHT

DURING THE past 70 years, almost 10,000 vehicles have been tested by Wheels. Ranking them in terms of talent would be a mammoth task and would possibly create a roster of cars very different to the one assembled here.

These are the greats and greatness can be a surprisingly tricky concept to nail down. Case in point, the Ferrari F40. There are many objectively superior supercars, yet few would deny that the F40 captured a moment and built its legend from exactly the sort of raw intangibles that separate the great from the good.

By the same token, this is no rose-tinted wallow in nostalgia. Some phenomenal cars have failed to make the cut and there will be some surprises. There may be one or two choices that seem parochial and for that we make no excuses. Wheels is a proudly Australian publication and cars that work for Aussie buyers are always going to gain a degree of additional credit.

Created by Wheels staffers past and present, the list will doubtless exclude some of your personal favourites. It excludes some of mine too, but all to often our choices are just that: personal. How they stack up in a broader context is often a very different consideration.

To some, greatness is, like the Roth test, a threshold whereby you know it when you see it but is otherwise hard to define. Sometimes a car only needs to do one simple thing extremely well to elevate itself. In other instances, it’s a track record of years of continual improvement. Then there are those that are intermittently great, interspersed by years of mediocre vintage.

We’ve separated the vehicles into seven specific genres. Some are, by nature, a richer source of greatness than others. We could likely have populated the supercars list with ten alternates and it still not look conspicuously odd. Nevertheless, we’ve nailed our colours to the mast and here are the 70 from 70 years of Wheels.