Gallery: The most expensive cars you can’t drive on the street

What's better than a million-dollar hypercar? Well, if you're Aston Martin, Ferrari, or McLaren, the answer is an even more expensive hypercar that's not even street-legal. Crazy, right? There's a bit of a war going on in the upper reaches of the automotive stratosphere, you see. It started with new halo cars from Porsche, Ferrari, and McLaren, each of whom have built carbon fiber sports cars with advanced hybrid powertrains and horsepower numbers almost as large as their price tags.

But for McLaren and Ferrari, their P1 and LaFerrari (respectively) cars weren't quite exclusive enough, and apparently made too many compromises in the name of satisfying the authorities that they complied with street car regulations. That's lead to even faster versions, the McLaren P1 GTR and Ferrari LaFerrari FXX-K (yes, really) that have to be delivered to a racetrack by a transporter, even though they're not actually race cars (there's no racing series rulebook that they conform to). Aston Martin haven't even bothered with a road-going version of their new hypercar, the Vulcan, which will be formally unveiled at next week's Geneva Motor Show (as will the P1 GTR). They also haven't bothered with batteries, relying instead on a development of their mighty V12 (making the Vulcan the least powerful of the three, although probably the best looking).

Whether or not these hypercars make any sense probably depends on whether or not you could afford the $2 or $3 million price. If it was our $2.5 million we'd probably spend it on a retired racing car with history behind it that we could actually go racing in, but that doesn't come with a cool pair of factory-branded racing overalls and the pretense of being part of a development program. Or maybe a brand new GT3 racing car from the same companies, with the rest spent on competing around the world. On the other hand, I doubt any owner of a P1 GTR or FXX-K or Vulcan will be having a bad time.