As road test editor on CAR Magazine, I’m lucky enough to drive some pretty tasty cars, but it all climaxes with our Performance Car Of The Year (PCOTY) shoot-out. This year was particularly epic with the Ferrari 458, Porsche GT2 RS, BMW M3 GTS, Mercedes AMG SLS and Lamborghini Superleggera mixing it with real-world heroes like the Renaultsport Megane Cup, Subaru Impreza Cosworth and Lotus Elise S.

Now, usually on PCOTY we thrash the cars over our favourite UK roads, then head to a race circuit, take some snaps, and run the story over 15 or so pages in the mag.

This year we teamed up with Michelin, which meant we could lavish more pages on the shoot, so we settled on a slightly different format: a 36-page supplement packed with the kind of 2500-mile European road trip we’ve all wanted to experience, a chance to properly live with the cars for days on end. All in the name of testing the cars thoroughly, you understand.

It’s a bit of a logistical nightmare, but I started out with CAR’s Chris Chilton in not so glamorous Peterborough in the Impreza, then blatted down to Dover, where we met Jethro Bovingdon, Ben Pulman, Alex Tapley and superstar snapper Greg Pajo in the Lotus, Ferrari and BMW 530d support car, before boarding the ferry for Europe.

Meanwhile, workshops across Germany and Italy were busy preparing the Lambo, GT2 RS, Merc SLS and M3 GTS.

The plan was for them to be loaded onto trucks and delivered to the top of famous Tour de France leg Mont Ventoux, while other CAR staffers flew in to Marseille – no shortage of volunteers to help out with driving this selection of cars.

We all knew what the plan was, but the next day, when the trucks actually turned up, we still all tripped over our own tongues. Honestly, it just doesn’t get better than having the year’s best supercars delivered to your favourite road.

Over the next few days we drove not only Mont Ventoux, but also the tunnels above Monaco, the various ‘col’ mountain roads that you might have seen on the Monte Carlo rally, the fast, sweeping and just epically epic Route Napoleon and there were a whole lot of late-night autoroutes in between.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was the tasty stuff that we all fought over, but the Renaultsport Megane proved that you don’t need to blow six figures to have the drive of your life.

You’ll see it all in the 2011 edition of CAR Magazine, available on newstands now.

- Ben Barry

For further reading on Car's PCOTY check out their site here - Paddy