You don't have to be an Anglophile to appreciate that the British have a special way with sports cars. From their lowliest creations to their most rarefied, perhaps more than any people­—save the Italians­—the Brits have through the years managed to truly span the sports car gamut. From cars cheap and cheerful to extraordinarily not cheap but still

cheerful, they've been doing something right seemingly forever.

Two cars we drove last week proved the point: Even if you let yourself become distracted by the larger British industry—the one that's spent the last half century imploding, exploding, rusting, shorting out, and generally coming apart at the seams—it's impossible to deny that unique spark, sheer smarts, and positive-ground creativity Britain has lent the cause of sporting machinery.

Never is this more obvious today than when you walk into the spiffy, ultra-modern factory and headquarters of McLaren and its squirrelly overlord, Ron Dennis. Here you'll see a steady procession of mid-engine, carbon-fiber supercars being built and sent forth from Surrey to the world. Like the great sports car racing and Formula 1 cars before them, not to mention the über-classic F1 road car of the 1990s, these new McLarens are rolling embodiments of the central duality—­big-brained engineering, craft prowess­—of an island nation where the cottage-built, giant-slaying race car is the once and future king. Recent issue includes the Tarocco Orange 650S Spider whose keys we were handed last week in Lower Manhattan.

If attention and envious stares were all we were after, we might never have left downtown. We'd alighted briefly at 20th and Fifth to score some wiffle balls, which is probably the least valuable thing anyone driving an orange McLaren has ever stopped to buy. (Yeah, that's right, wiffle balls.) Then we were mobbed.

Two years ago, we'd discovered how comprehensively Middle America was blown away by the sight of the 650S' predecessor, the MP4-12C, when we drove one cross-country. That had surprised us, given the 12C's faintly generic styling, but the renamed, handsomer (if still familiar) 650S surprised us even more as it literally stopped traffic in jaded NYC. This was full-throated, cross-cultural appreciation, double-take-inducing, street-crossing love at first sight, replete with photo ops and countless smiling selfies featuring McLaren's luminous spacecraft, the only sour note being an army of meter minders standing by, waiting to pounce.

And when it was time to go, the pocked roads of New York City proved so inhospitable that even the clever adaptive hydraulic suspension of the 650S was caught out, brutalizing man and machine. Fortunately, we were on smooth parkways soon enough, headed for Connecticut, where we were once again able to appreciate the McLaren's smooth side; its immensely capable road-holding; its mighty, sweet-sounding, small-bore twin-turbo V-8; and all the road-pounding possibility 641 horsepower can offer, plus 24 mpg and an interior that has visibly eked its way up from the slightly déclassé debut effort of the 12C. It's as you might hope, with the Spider's as-tested $332,835 price tag.

Our intention on this day was to celebrate not just the loftiest heights of British sports car construction but also its minor summits, for in sports car-ing as in mountaineering and in life, many more will actually become acquainted with the low peaks than the high ones. And so the road to Connecticut led us to Branford and the premises of BugEyeGuy.com.

Infatuated from childhood with the littlest Healey­—one of the greatest postwar expressions of the supreme minimalist end of the sports car spectrum—website and shop proprietor David Silberkleit has devoted the last seven years of his life to the runabout Donald Healey's team designed for British Motor Corp. on a shoestring. A great example of parts-bin engineering, the Sprite shared components with contemporary Morris Minors and other humble rides, which tells you something about how truly clever it was—­its monocoque construction was state of the art in 1958—but little about how fun it is to drive.

In fact, around town on a sunny day, at speeds up to 40 mph, I'd take a Sprite over the McLaren. On the other hand, for speeds between 41 and 204 mph, I'd have to go with the McLaren.

Either way, the British industry has me covered, for which I am grateful. Building fun, credible sports cars isn't easy. But on the bright side, it can't be as hard as keeping an empire together.