The Queen's Car Wish List

Every other page on this site is here to help you choose a car you can actually buy. This page is not. This is the Queen's Car Wish List: total high end, gloriously unaffordable, and completely unashamed about it. Nobody needs a single car on this list. That is precisely the point of a wish list.

So pour something sparkling, put the sensible spreadsheet away, and count down with us to the one we'd hang the crown on.

10. MINI - the palace runabout

Yes, really, and here's why: watch what the A-list actually drive between the mansions and you will spot one of these squeezing into an impossible space outside a members' club. Every proper dream garage keeps one glamorous little thing for the city, and the MINI is the original celebrity runabout - cheeky, beautifully made, and somehow cooler than cars fifty times the price. Royalty has driven them for decades. The crown notices these things.

9. Range Rover - the throne on wheels

The car for arriving. A country house that does 0-100, a first-class lounge that happens to conquer mountains, and the default transport of everyone from Kensington to the Hollywood Hills. Solihull builds them, which the founder takes personally and proudly. The valet stands up straighter. That is the whole review.

8. Maserati MC20 - the quiet stunner

The one nobody expects and everybody photographs. Butterfly doors, a carbon heart, and beauty worn more quietly than the rest of Italy manages. The one we met wore black on black, trident glinting, and made the whole showroom drop its voice. This is the connoisseur's supercar - for the Queen who would rather be discovered than announced.

7. Porsche 911 - the one you'd actually use

Every wish list needs one car you could genuinely drive every single day, and sixty years of obsessive perfecting have made the 911 exactly that: fast enough to frighten, friendly enough to forgive, eternally cool. The one we found was a GT3 in head-to-toe black, all wing and intent. The dream you could live with. Dangerous thought, that.

6. McLaren 750S - the scalpel

Feather-light, savagely quick, engineered like a fighter jet that took a wrong turn onto the road. In papaya orange it looks like a lit fuse. This is the track-day entry on the list - because the wish list includes the driving, not just the parking.

5. Bentley Continental GT - the grand entrance

Hand-stitched leather, quilted calm, and muscular menace in black. The Continental crosses continents in a single cosseted breath and makes brute power feel like impeccable manners. This is how you arrive when arriving is the whole event - which, on this list, it always is.

4. Aston Martin DB12 - the icon

The silhouette that means class in any language, the badge a certain spy made immortal, and every bit as beautiful in the metal as the legend promises. A little founder's bias, declared and unrepentant - she was born down the road from where the legend lives. The crown allows it.

3. Rolls-Royce Spectre - the future, gilded

The most extraordinary machine here, because it is silent. Rolls-Royce went electric more gracefully than anyone: the Spectre glides like a rumour, wrapped in craft that makes everything else on Earth feel mass-produced. The future of luxury, and it looks utterly serene about it.

2. Lamborghini Huracán - the poster car

Every generation gets one car that stops ten-year-olds dead in the street, and the Huracán has been doing it for a decade: a shrieking V10 in a suit of angles, the poster car that actually lived on posters. The one we met wore white like a dare. Loud, absurd, magnificent. Nobody ever pinned a spreadsheet to a bedroom wall.

1. Ferrari SF90 Spider - the crown

And the crown goes to a car we have actually stood beside, because the court does its own hunting now. A thousand hybrid horsepower, a roof that folds away in fourteen seconds, and this one dressed in deep Verde over ivory - proof that the most dramatic machine on Earth can also be the best-dressed thing in the room. Every other car on this list shouts. The SF90 hums, folds its roof back, and lets the room come to it. That is the definition of a Queen, and that is why it wears the crown.

The Royal Calendar - where these cars belong

A wish list needs a social diary to match. The events the court dreams of, passport required:

• Monaco Grand Prix - the crown jewel. Superyachts in the harbour, royalty on the balconies, Formula 1 threading the casino square. The most glamorous weekend in all of motorsport, no contest.
• Goodwood Festival of Speed - an English country estate, every priceless machine on Earth, and the world's most stylish garden party. The one event where the cars on this list outnumber the parking spaces.
• Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance - California's catwalk for cars. Millions of dollars of coachwork on a golf course by the Pacific, and the champagne is cold by ten.
• Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix, Melbourne - our home fixture. Albert Park in autumn, the whole travelling circus in town, and the closest the royal calendar comes to a Sydney day trip.
• Mille Miglia, Italy - a thousand miles of Italy waving you through villages like visiting royalty. The most beautiful drive on the planet, full stop.

The point of a wish list is not that you'll never have these things. It's that wanting them keeps the spark lit - and the spark is what got every one of us into cars in the first place. Pin the poster. Book the grandstand. Dream in horsepower.

Back on Earth? Our Verdicts cover the excellent cars you can actually buy this year, and the True Cost to Own calculator does the grown-up maths. Choose it, run it, love it - at every altitude.

A wish list, not a buyer's guide - prices for cars like these are gloriously beside the point. Photography: Queen of Cars where credited, otherwise via Wikimedia Commons under the CC licences noted; number plates and any faces blurred per our privacy policy. A movement for my Queens, whoever you are.