But most of them packed small engines, which were worthy and reliable but failed to inject the white hot performance the chassis begged for. Stuart Milne says the Celica GT-Four changed all that.

It's hard to believe Toyota's Celica was born way back in 1970. It’s the kind of car that’s easy to overlook, because it's reliable, sensible and good value for money.

Think of it this way, you always remember the wild girls from your past; never the ones who spent their evenings with their nose in a book.

But plenty of those girls had a crazy streak a mile wide; its just you’d have to scratch the surface to reveal it.

Once you've seen it, you'll never forget.

And that's like the Celica GT-Four for me. It was out for years before I took any notice of the turbocharged, four-wheel drive coupe.

When I discovered it, I was bitten by the bug in the most ferocious way.

The first generation GT-Four rolled out of Toyota's factories in 1986, and its 190bhp engine put it straight at the top of the Celica range.

Four years later, its replacement gave it curves, and the bonnet scoop that inspired a thousand car modifiers. It came with a pair of typically nineties pop-up headlamps too.

Performance junkies were more interested in the eminently tunable 185bhp engine, complete with a state of the art twin entry turbocharger.

It wasn't until 1994 that I woke up to the Celica - which by now sported a pleasant 205bhp. And alongside well thumbed stacks of Max Power magazine were pictures of white bug-eyed 'Licas, complete with green and red Castrol livery.

Usually these would feature rally drivers charging through water splashes, or hurtling through the desert equipped with huge bull-bars and anti-sand air snorkels poking high in the sky.

Well, you wouldn't want an engine suffering terminal sand asphyxiation in the middle of the Sahara, would you?

I got a lift in a GT-Four once. It was heavily tuned, loud, and driven by someone who should never have been given a license.

Blasting through Guildford at a pace that would turn the most hardcore adrenalin junkie to a quivering wreck; it was quite possibly the scariest encounter of my life.

That short, fast blast confirmed the Four is one of the truly great rally cars.

Naturally this means prices are high for cared-for models, and you can pay up to £8,000 for a 1994 or 1995 model. But if you're just happy for a bit of cheap speed, early ones are available for a few hundred quid.