Which brands, a colleague wondered, could retail a car at under thirty grand but also, like Alfa Romeo, launch a limited-edition, several-million-pound supercar?

Alfa Romeo won't quote a price for the new 33 Stradale, so it's impossible to know for sure how much it costs. Tragically, it's not on the regular model configurator.

I saw a build slot for one of the 33 examples advertised at £3.5m, but even if that is genuine (I'm unconvinced), asking isn't getting, several people would want to profit from it and who knows if that allows for possible option costs.

Those can change things drastically. McLaren says the average array of options on its £2m W1 add £600,000 to each car and that one customer is spending £900,000.

Anyway, it doesn't matter. What matters is that you can spend as little as £29,015 or something approaching 100 times that on an Alfa Romeo. Is that unique?

In the market, right now, I think one could fairly confidently say that it is - and that it's the broadest model price spread in the business. But who else could, if they chose to, do similar?

My colleague thought hardly anyone, but I'm not so convinced. Almost every manufacturer wanting millions for limited-edition cars will be reaching upwards from its normal sphere, of course-even McLaren or Rolls-Royce. But I think what would mark most out as able to do it is not how far upwards they're stretching but how far down they've already stretched.

Take Mercedes-Benz, BMW or Audi, for example. They could make squillion-pound cars and indeed have. Most recently, the AMG One was around £2.4m, while an A-Class can be had for budget-Alfa money.

What enables them to do it at the top end of the market is ultimately the same reason people want their cars at the bottom end. They've decades of experience of making expensive, thoroughly engineered cars-a lot of them for racing. If it feels okay to hand over £2m to a manufacturer because it has won eight Formula 1 constructors' championships, it fairly well stands to reason that it also feels fine to hand over £30,000 to one.

What's perhaps surprising about this is that premium or luxury (or who would like to think of themselves as luxury) manufacturers moved down into mainstream segments seemingly without affecting their appeal at the top end.

It has been an awfully long time since the introduction of the A-Class, BMW 1 Series and Audi A1. There was a fear, for a time, that selling better-value cars would 'cheapen' those brands - lessen their appeal as premium names. It doesn't seem, though, to have come to pass.

Even discounting the unobtanium, Audi, BMW and Mercedes routinely sell cars costing into the hundreds of thousands, which is very lucrative business - certainly more so than selling cars cheaply.

Pity, then, those manufacturers, many with long and storied pasts, that couldn't pull off this feat, and for which value cars are effectively the whole deal. For them, a shift of just a few per cent in sales when margins are incredibly tight can mean the difference between a modest profit or an extraordinary loss.

I don't think there's a Chinese manufacturer that could do it today (at least in Europe) - but, given that Toyota and Honda probably could, who's to say that won't change in the future?

Could, say, Vauxhall or Citroën or Skoda realistically pitch customers a 'few-off' car at £3m? It feels unrealistic.

Unusually for a car maker with value roots, Ford could and has made very expensive cars. It made 1350 examples of its most recent GT and charged £1.4m for a 67-off track-only version.

Racing, then, must count for something. I don't suppose anyone has raced as much as Ford, and it feels to me like it would be at the root of the appeal of most of these kinds of cars. I know they used to say 'win on Sunday, sell on Monday', but it feels like there's more to it than that. More 'win in 1966, sell in 2026'. It has always been difficult to quantify the amount of cars an extensive racing programme helps to sell, but I think it changes the kinds of car one is able to sell too.