Who would win an Olympics for cars?

The 2024 Olympic Games are almost done and dusted. Along with the traditional swimming, track and field, cycling, and gymnastics – just to name a few – The Games have expanded to include new-age sports like speed rock climbing, skating, and breakdancing. Cars remain conspicuous by their absence, though.

Which got us wondering: which nation would top the medal tally if the Olympics were a celebration of automotive performance instead of the peak for human sporting achievement? In other words, this is actually quite a tough thing to work out. Here’s how our team went about it. This is an obvious one, but it’s hard to see the might of the German automotive industry being beaten.

There’s a romance to the idea of an Italian team; a Ferrari-Lamborghini-Pagani-Alfa Romeo athletics relay team would be tough to beat, while the Maserati GranTurismo strikes me as a natural marathon competitor as a quick grand tourer. Throw in the Fiat 500 as a gymnastics entrant, and you’ve some bases covered. But stereotypes are hard to shake, and it feels cruel to subject Italian cars to the Olympic pool lest they pick up a rust-related injury.

The idea of Team USA crossed my mind, and they would be able to enter most events. But the might of the German industry was just too strong to avoid. Porsche makes the world’s best track cars, so that’s the athletics covered.

Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have strong commercial vehicle arms to take on the grunt-based field events, and I can’t t.