A110 S

Between Tempio Pausania and Aggius the road slips into a lunar landscape of wind-polished granite — Gallura's Valle della Luna — and changes direction every hundred metres: short climbs, tight hairpins threading the cork-oak woods, a surface that rises and falls beneath you. Out here power counts for little and lightness counts for everything: with barely a thousand kilos to manage, the A110 S changes line as quickly as a thought. Several stretches of this country feature among the Sardinian roads that deserve a real driver's car.

Climb towards Monte Limbara and the air cools, the corners open out, and the viewpoints take in half of Gallura; from there you drop back to the coast — perhaps as far as the territory covered by our rental service in Santa Teresa Gallura, where another valley of granite, at Capo Testa, meets the sea. One day, two landscapes, only one car that could do it.

The 1.8-litre turbo behind the seats has a gravelly, junior-racer voice: turbo whistle under load, short crackles on the overrun, complete discretion on the transfer sections. The 300 hp feel like far more because they are pushing a feather — 0-100 km/h in 4.2 seconds is only the opening line, the rest written by brakes that bite at the first brush of the pedal and a 7-speed dual-clutch that always has the right gear to hand.

The steering is light and instant, body roll all but absent, and the car pivots around its driver as though the centre of gravity were in your pockets. It is the same philosophy that made the original A110 great, the giant-killer of 1970s rallying: low weight, mid-mounted engine, zero excess. Sixty years on, the principle still works.

The S is the sharpened A110: 300 hp, stiffer springs and anti-roll bars, a set-up tuned for surgical precision rather than softness. On Sardinian roads that calibration translates into more solid support through quick direction changes — without your back paying the price on the run to the beach.

Within our selection of sports cars for rent in Sardinia, it is the contrarian choice: no oversized badge, no horsepower theatre, just French substance dressed in Bleu Alpine. Drivers returning the keys almost always reach for the same word: "a toy". Check availability with our WhatsApp concierge and find out why.