The diversity of the engines on show in the 1966 Formula One season would have sent any self-respecting UKIP candidate into meltdown. The '66 starting grid saw 2.0- and 3.0-litre V8s, a 1.0-litre inline four-cylinder, a Ferrari V6, a host of V12s and, most remarkably, a 3.0-litre H16 from BRM. An H16! Reports of the day noted its racing success was limited due to being 'heavy and complex'. Imagine.

Such drivetrain diversity has, of course, long departed F1. Same story with other corners of technology, too. In the early days of what we now call smartphones, way back in the mid-Noughties, there were flippy phones and slidey phones and phones with unwieldy great fold-out keyboards.

Now all smartphones look give-or-take like an iPhone. The first efforts at boiling water using the power of electricity doubtless generated some pretty wild designs, but now all kettles look like, um, kettles. As the rate of technology increases, so diversity tends to decrease.

With one exception: fast road cars. Just look at the variation here at Speed Week. The electric Tesla P85D and hybrid BMW i8 may represent the very corners of the sportscar envelope, but even this Huracan and AMG GT S demonstrate there's no status quo when it comes to flinging a couple of humans down a stretch of tarmac.

Sure, both have four wheels and two seats, both drink petrol, but both offer entirely different solutions to the challenge of going quickly. In the red corner, the front-engined, rear-drive German with a turbo V8. In the sort-of-greyish-black corner, a four-wheel-drive Italian with a nat-asp V10 mounted midships.

Not only are they as different on paper as chalk and, y'know, Bavarian dog cheese, but so contrasting are the Merc and Lambo to drive that they feel not only of different breeds, but different species entirely.

Before its launch, I had the AMG GT S pegged as a compact, lithe, accessible rival to the Porsche 911. It really isn't. This thing is a Sturm und Drang muscle car, a growling, brawling lump of V8 with enough chest hair to comb upwards into a gristly pair of sideburns.

The 4.0 twin-turbo V8 might not have quite the whipcrack responsiveness of the SLS's old 6.2-litre nat-asp unit, but it's brutally effective nonetheless, serving up a savage thump of low-end torque that morphs to a mosh-pit metal roar past 5,000rpm. If you've seen Mad Max: Fury Road, imagine that film's deafening, petrolly soundtrack compressed into a small two-seater cabin. Entertaining? No doubt. Intimidating? Just a bit.

As is the driving experience. As in its big-brother predecessor SLS, you sit way back near the rear axle of the GT, surveying a vast prow of bonnet ahead. The front wheels feel several postcodes distant, while your posterior seems nestled right between the rear wheels, receiving every slip and shimmy in High-Definition Butt-O-Vision.

It all leads to a slightly disjointed feeling: whereas, in the Lambo, you feel right in the middle of the action, the four corners of the car pivoting around you, in the Merc you're the pendulum. That's the case with all front-engined, rear-drive cars to some extent, but the AMG feels more so than most, despite the V8 actually lurking entirely behind the front axle (in fact, the Merc's weight centre is, oddly given its profile, actually a fraction behind middle).

That sensation of distance is magnified by the steering. Though the variable-ratio set-up gives the Merc a rabidly quick front end, it comes at the expense of genuine feel. Rather than sense through your fingers when you're running out of grip on the front tyres, you have to just chuck the AMG in and hope it'll stick. It does.

Sometimes too much. To the great surprise of the Speed Week crew, the AMG GT S wasn't keen to do sideways, and not just in my greasy, flailing hands. Maybe it was the track temperature, maybe the Red Bull Ring's sticky tarmac, but even TG's finest merchants of oversteer struggled to coax the Merc into steady, controllable slides.

Partly that's because switching the AMG's stability and control systems to Actually Properly Genuinely Off is a complex operation requiring the code-breaking skills of a Bletchley Park ace.

But, even when we finally breached the mainframe and vanquished the nannies, the Merc still proved surprisingly spiky in the oversteer department. A strange state of affairs, given that most of AMG's produce generally desires to chuck itself into a drift at the least provocation: exiting a supermarket parking space, say.

But that's with traction control off. Dial the settings back to Sport+, and you find a sportscar with a serious amount of grip and pummelling pace. Even so, the AMG reminds me of the BMW M4 we brought to last year's Speed Week: no question fast, no question an impressive technical achievement, but a car that keeps you slightly at arm's length from its innermost, oily workings.

It might seem a little unfair to line up a Mercedes sports car against a Lambo supercar, but they're not so far apart as you might think, these two. The Merc doesn't give away much in the power department, the GT S's V8 making 510hp against the Lambo V10's 610hp.

And sure, prices may start just under EU100,000 for the Poundland-spec, 475hp AMG GT (OK, it's all relative), but if you want this full-fat GT S and a few goodies, you're looking at the fat end of EU140,000. The Huracan starts at EU180,000, though of course you can punt it way north of that with some injudicious optionry.

You know what? It might sound churlish to describe a EU180k lump of Italian exotica as representing decent value, but the Huracan does at least offer two cars for the price of one.

On the one hand, it's a rare-breed V10 loon, that grand, naturally aspirated engine climbing to a cortex-melting shriek as it closes in on an 8,250rpm limit, every brush of the accelerator returning an instant, savage response.

On the other hand ' and at the very same time, no less ' it's the most usable, friendly of 4WD sportscars, one that encourages you to wring every last drop from the engine and tyres, that precise double-clutch 'box a lifetime removed from the thumping robo-manual in the Aventador.

The 4WD set-up is equally sublime. In a tight corner, you can feather the Huracan between under- and oversteer on the throttle, the multiplate clutch shifting power seamlessly between front and rear. It never feels like it's going to bite – it's always entirely on your side.

There has surely never been a more approachable, exploitable mid-engined supercar than this one. Through your hands, your backside, even your ears, you know exactly what the Huracan's up to, exactly when it's considering letting go.

I realise this is the sort of sentence one might write a couple of weeks before being found deep in a field somewhere in Norfolk, clinging forlornly to a detached steering wheel with shards of Lambo decorating the surrounding hedgerows, but until that point I'm sticking with it.

As when we tested the Huracan on ice in our big Sub Zero extravaganza a few months back [Issue 268], I'm struggling to spot the catch with the Huracan – beyond, y'know, the fact it costs EU180,000.

Rear visibility is not too hot, but hey, if the view out the back is your biggest concern, you probably won't be shortlisting a mid-engined Italian supercar. And some might find the cabin – with its points and strakes and jet-fighter-inspired whatsits – a bit juvenile. But again, isn't that rather the point of a mid-engined Italian supercar?

Yes, the Huracan is less bitey than its predecessors, but sanding Lambo's traditionally sharper edges hasn't resulted in a car that feels blunt, homogenised or watered-down. It simply makes more of that prodigious power available more of the time.

Sure, there will be faster, spikier versions to come – a GT3-inspired Super Trofeo or similar, likely a lightweight Superleggera, maybe a RWD-only variant too – but this oh-so-tame base version is plenty for me, ta.

The AMG GT S is, no doubt, a compelling car, one that requires a concerted effort to learn to get the best from it. And in this broadband-enabled, content-on-demand, instant-streaming world in which we live, maybe that's no bad thing. Just don't expect to jump in it and be an instant hero.

The Lambo, conversely, crowns you a driving god each and every time you wriggle down into its low, bolstered seat. It's a screaming supercar and friendly, four-wheel-drive sports car in one. Diversity, innit?