For car manufacturers, 10 years is almost tangible. New cars we’re writing about this month began on a sketchpad five years ago, and were twinkles in their designer’s eye eons before that. In motorsport, 10 years is an ocean of time, whipped up by abrupt regulation changes, technological breakthroughs and fickle fans. It’s impossible to predict where top-flight motorsport will find itself a decade down the line. But that hasn’t stopped us from prodding the greatest minds in the sport until they agreed to speculate.

It’s all Renault’s fault. Once we got wind of the R.S. 2027 Vision F1 Concept, we set about convincing the reigning Le Mans 24hrs champion, Porsche, to have the same hypothetical conversation about an LMP1 prototype for 2027, before sketching its ideas, just for us. Then we asked Citroen Racing, the most successful team in WRC history, to do the same. The results are radical, but in all cases grown from the seeds of technology that already exists – you’ll find no flying cars or nuclear fission here…

This feature originally appeared in the June 2017 issue of Top Gear magazine