The mission: create an "affordable" Porsche that will be embraced by enthusiasts of the marque; one whose styling is linked to Porsche's past, but not weighed down by it. The answer: the Boxster, a small mid-engine Porsche whose appearance evokes the excitement of the racing RSKs and RS60s of the mid-Fifties through the early Sixties, but done in the thoroughly modern idiom. The Boxster was first shown at the 1991 Tokyo auto show, and we can expect the production version, dubbed the 986, to appear in the spring of 1996.

Road cars that can exceed 210 mph can be counted on the fingers of one hand--with a couple of fingers left over. One of them is the Jaguar XJ220, an aluminum-bodied mid-engine supercar conceived at Jaguar and built at Tom Walkinshaw's JaguarSport competition facility. Essentially a race car with a layer of civility applied afterward, the XJ220 is powered by a twin-turbo V-6 (detuned slightly from its competition form) mated to an aluminum honeycomb composite structure that isn't too far removed from Jaguar's Group C and IMSA GTP cars. In this case, racing certainly does improve the breed.

"Genius" is perhaps the most apt word to describe the McLaren F1, brainchild of Formula 1 engineer/innovator Gordon Murray. The F1 boasts one of the highest power-to-weight ratios of any exotic-its 550-bhp BMW Motorsport V-12 with transverse 6-speed gearbox has only 2250 lb. of carbon-fiber-chassis exotic car to push around, resulting in a top speed of more than 220 mph and a 0-to-60-mph time of 4.0 seconds, truly eyeball-flattening acceleration. Its driver sits in the center of the car, flanked on either s