Associating the terms “performance car” and “front-wheel drive” may seem as contradictory as “deep-fried” and “tofu” (surely there’s at least one county fair that has already thought of that). And many of us have had the term “wrong-wheel drive” ingrained in our minds for so long that copping to being fond of any front-driver feels like the vehicular equivalent of admitting you have a thing for one of the vapid attention whores MTV seems intent on churning out at a Hank Ford/Tin Lizzie pace (Let the record show I would have a very, very hard time pulling my hand away if Lauren Conrad started writing her number on it. Moving on…). But if you dig through the annals of automotive history, you’re bound to find a few fun-loving cars which happen pull themselves along the road that you’d stick in your dream garage.

So what’s the object of your steering-and-accelerating-with-the-same-tires crush? A Japanese hot hatch that sounds like a horde of homicidal hornets when you’re giving it the beans? An American sports sedan with the unmistakable thrust (and thumb-snapping torquesteer) of a forced-induction powerplant? Or perhaps a certain Franco-Italian GT that is far too cool for a conventional suspension system?
To help inspire (or confuse) you, be sure to check out this top 10 list I came up with a while back for one of my other car scribe gigs, Sub5Zero. Something tells me there will be some familiar names giving me an earful (monitorful?) about my choices there and here. But let’s not lose sight of the matter at hand: What’s the best front-drive performance car?