THE craziest car I drove this year - in fact, the maddest, looniest, most utterly bonkers machine I have ever attempted to exert any form of control over - was the Ford Escort owned by Dundee garage owner Colin Simpson, who very kindly allowed me to race his car at a Knockhill meeting which happened to coincide with his summer holiday.

To say this was no ordinary Escort would be to understate the case absurdly. To start with, it's an Mk1, which makes it something of a historic relic, since Ford stopped building those in 1975.

Most Mk1s are inoffensive machines, but this one is the sort of thing that makes you wake up sweating in the middle of the night after you've had too much cheese for supper. That's because its modified Sierra Cosworth engine produces something in the order of 400bhp, which is quite a lot in a car that was originally designed to cope with about 65.

Enormous tyres help keep the Escort under control, but only just. Racing the car at Knockhill involves whistling up to 130mph-plus on each of the longest straights (which aren't so long at that speed) and sliding at hilarious angles round all the corners. Not pretty, but great fun.

Of the almost equally memorable road cars I drove in 1998, one was as different from Colin Simpson's Escort as any car could be without actually falling over. It was a Caterham 21, a namby-pamby device compared with the 7 produced by the same company, but a real road racer compared with almost everything else on the market.

The 21 I tried uses a standard version of Rover's K-Series engine. It produces only a modest amount of power, but that's okay because like all Caterhams, this one is very light. Light cars do not need much power to perform well in a straight line, and they have an inherent advantage over heavy cars when it comes to braking and cornering ability. No other car I wrote about in The Herald this year demonstrated that better than the 21.

And yet if you know what you're doing you can design a heavy car that handles well too. In the same way that Oliver Hardy moved with a delicacy astonishing for a man of his size, the Cadillac Seville, which weighs about as much as Schiehallion, earned its place as one of my 1998 favourites through its quite superb poise and balance.

This is perhaps all the more surprising given that the Seville transfers its 305bhp to the road by way of the front wheels. People who think those wheels should be devoted to braking and direction changes and nothing else assume that to feed power through them as well is to invite torque steer, understeer and other horrors, but you have to drive the Cadillac really badly, as a number of magazine testers did, before any of that happens.

I want to own a Cadillac, but I wouldn't mind not doing so as long as I could have a Mercedes C43 AMG. Its predecessor, the C36, was one of my favourite cars ever, partly because of how good it was when you went very fast and partly because of how good it was when you went very slowly.

I can't recommend it more highly than to say that I have always wanted one, even though they were only available with automatic transmission, which in my hate-list of ghastly motoring inventions is second only to the cup holder.

The C43 does everything even better than the C36. You still can't buy a manual version, and I still don't care. There is no car I want more.

For me these were the highlights of 1998. Honourable mention number one goes to the Ford Focus, which was my nomination for the AA Scottish Car of the Year because it was so much better than it might have been if Ford built cars the way it did as recently as five years ago (my more eminent colleagues in the Association of Scottish Motoring Writers may have been thinking along similar lines - at any rate it won easily).

Second honourable mention goes to the 170bhp Subaru Forester S-Turbo, one of the best handling cars there is, and a source of regret because it demonstrated that there should be such a car as a 170bhp Impreza, though there isn't, nor is there ever likely to be.

I would also praise the Volvo S70 XC as the best combination of performance on-road and leisure off-road vehicle on the market, but last time I did that out loud a colleague who detests the thing very nearly started attacking me with the hotel furniture. I still think it's a brilliant car, but I'm careful about saying so these days.