Nevertheless, here it is: and however late in the year we have to do it, however challenging and inhospitable the conditions, we always will. What youre about to read is what resulted from a couple of days of road-only testing and photography of our more affordable contestants amid the misty fields of Exmoor, followed by a couple more of our pricier runners carried out on an utterly sodden Castle Combe circuit and some nearby roads.

They’re ranked in order, and we start at the bottom – though in this case it’s a car we couldn’t complete testing with because of mechanical failure: