The Top Gear Story

by Martin Roach

  The article was in the wake of the BBC having to combat the flames of a ‘racism’ row in 2009 surrounding the highly popular Strictly Come Dancing, when Anton Du Beke referred off-screen to his dance partner Laila Rouass as a ‘Paki’. Du Beke immediately apologised, but then the show’s presenter Bruce Forsyth said the country needed to get a sense of humour, which further angered some people. Brucie himself then issued a statement to clarify his words, saying, ‘Racially offensive language is never either funny or acceptable.’ And just as the BBC was attempting to draw a line under the controversy, Clarkson penned his far-from-innocuous thoughts in Top Gear magazine. As is often the way, however, his words were selectively quoted: yes, he’d said that but he also defended women drivers and asked why there were none in Formula 1. By way of proving that women are brilliant drivers, he finished the column saying the worst driver in the world was Top Gear’s own studio director.

  Clarkson’s producer, his old school friend Andy Wilman, is even less forgiving. He admits that he finds it hard to take the BBC seriously when his team are hauled in over yet another complaint and has also gone on record saying that he ‘can’t be arsed with Ofcom’.

  On one occasion in 2009, it momentarily seemed as if the Top Gear haters might have finally secured their victory after all. Shortly after the Gordon Brown ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’ incident and the later c-word furore, Top Gear ran a compelling feature on the new V12 Aston Martin Vantage (Series 13, Episode 7), with the usual insightful and entertaining comments about a car that the show had historically been extremely positive about. At the end of the piece, however, Clarkson was filmed driving the beautiful car through classic British country roads but he suddenly turned melancholy, mulling in quiet tones about how that type of car was under increasing pressure from noise, safety and environmental campaigners. Perhaps in any other series, this might have been taken at face value but given recent problems, his closing comment that this ‘feels like an ending’ was imbued with massive symbolism. There was no last-minute gag, no tongue-in-cheek side remark or cheeky look to camera: only what appeared to be genuine sadness.

  That same night the internet was swamped with rumours on Twitter, in chat rooms and forums – was Top Gear over? Was Clarkson tipping us off this was it, that the game was up? Was that shot of the Aston cruising over the green hills the last-ever clip of Top Gear?

  Well, no. The BBC denied this was the end and said a programme as popular as Top Gear would not come to a close without the public being duly notified more formally in advance. Clarkson swiftly backed up his employers, saying in his Sun column that the show would return for a new series unless he got ‘struck by a giant meteorite or spontaneously combusts’. In fact, they had already started to film new episodes and so, in an indignant verbal volley bound to infuriate all Top Gear’s many critics, Clarkson went on to insist: ‘Fire up the Vantage!’

  CHAPTER 12

  Cheap Car Challenges

  An enduring and favourite Top Gear feature is the so-called ‘Cheap Car Challenge’. Clearly this part of the programme is not used to review new cars, but usually serves as a way to prove (or disprove) a point about the motoring/transport world or sometimes just to have a ludicrous day out. Budgets range from under £1,000 to as much as £10,000 when they were buying 1970s’ supercars (a Maserati Merak, a Ferrari 308 GT4 and a Lamborghini Urraco). The team has also spent £5,000 finding a track day car that’s useable on normal roads and among many others, tried a ‘How much lorry do you get for £5,000?’ They also filmed a cheap Porsche challenge and then a follow-up: the ‘Cheap Coupés that aren’t Porsches’ test.

  So, for the category of challenges that are filmed to prove a point, we see them buying a car for £100 to prove it’s cheaper to drive old bangers to Manchester than catch a train (which cost about £180). Clarkson’s Volvo 760 GLE won, principally because he only paid £1 for it! It was picked up as a former trade-in at a local dealership close to his Chipping Norton home. He’d been concerned that purchasing the car himself would leave him accused of using his profile to get a cheap head-start, so he actually sent his wife in to buy it.

  The Top Gear team has also driven around the M25 in a petrol and diesel version of the same car to examine fuel efficiency, attempted to get from London to Edinburgh and back in an Audi on one tank of diesel and subjected a Renault Scenic and Ford C-Max to one year’s worth of wear in a night to test its hardiness. To prove roadworks take too long to complete, they undertook a week’s worth of repairs near Bedford, Warwickshire and tried to complete the job in one day. With sustenance provided by roadside berries and later fish and chips, the team and their gang actually finished the task on time.

  Some of the challenges are mainly for comedy value, albeit with an undercurrent of seriousness, such as the ‘Can you buy an Alfa Romeo for £1,000 or less without it completely ruining your life all the time?’ For other challenges, however, the team is just having fun, there’s no serious side to a piece whatsoever and it really is all about the entertainment. For example, how about the time they tried to make their own police cars for £1,500? Equipping their chosen steeds with various frankly ridiculous contraptions, such as a homemade stinger, a paint-spraying theft prevention device and wheel spikes, among other tasks they had to attend and clear up a traffic accident and then best of all, chase a criminal – in this case a white-suited tame racing driver called Ronnie Stigs – around a track and apprehend him.

  The only slivers of possible seriousness were the digs reserved for the Health and Safety Executive, making the point that before a police team can deploy the so-called ‘boxing in’ technique, in theory they have to meet 13 separate criteria – all in the heat of a high-speed car chase. This piece was interspersed with a policeman telling the camera in dry detail about the methodology of chasing stolen vehicles, no doubt fulfilling the advertorial appeal of the feature to the Force. As ever, Clarkson scoffed at the protracted way of stopping criminals and the bureaucracy involved: in his opinion, you should be able to ram the car thief off the road or pull up alongside the vehicle and blow his head off. Now there’s one for the Police Complaints Authority!

  The cheap car premise has, of course, also been used for some of the show’s best long-form features. It’s at the heart of the previously mentioned ‘US Road Trip’ but also two further Top Gear specials, namely the treks through Vietnam and Bolivia. In the former, they travel 1,000 miles from Ho Chi Minh City north to near Hanoi, unusually this time mainly on motorbikes. The same distance is travelled through Bolivia in South America, a journey party to some hilarious scenes trying to get their three chosen vehicles on a raft, repairing a fuel cap with a tampon and waterproofing an engine with a lubricated condom. Sounds daft, but this particular special was a big ratings winner for the BBC.

  The same restricted budgets were the impetus for the team’s excursion through Botswana for one of the programme’s other specials. With Top Gear’s ever-expanding horizons, it was perhaps inevitable that they headed over to Africa. They were sent packing with just £1,500 each, under instruction to buy a strictly two-wheel drive, non-off-road vehicle with which to drive across the entire country, from the eastern border of Zimbabwe to the western border of Namibia, a distance of around 1,000 miles. The rules also stated that if one of the three cars broke down beyond reasonable repair, as a punishment the journey would have to be completed in a VW Beetle because they all dislike that particular German car so much.

  Clarkson chose a fetching 1981 Lancia Beta Coupé, which proved a disastrous choice and was constantly breaking down. Richard Hammond opted for a 40bhp Opel Kadett from 1963 (we are told it’s the same age as Jezza but in better nick) and James May bought a 1984 Mercedes-Benz 230E. The first challenge was to prove to people who live in Surrey that you don’t need a 4x4 if you live up a lane that occasionally gets leaves on the road. The cars quickly started to go wrong, with the Lancia’s rally heritage counting for nothing and May finding he had the knob from a five-gear Merc glued to wh
at he now discovered was a four-gear car. Driving through dense bush and wooded plains, the cars nonetheless somehow made it to camp, albeit with Hammond’s broken alternator meaning he had to light up the path with a hand-torch.

  While the ‘wooden spoon’ of the old VW Beetle followed them like some automotive Grim Reaper, the trio started the most obviously dangerous part of the journey: to cross the Okavango Delta game reserve, which is teeming with wild animals. By this point, Clarkson and May had already stripped their cars of much of the bodywork, so they had to stop off at a shanty town first to have hasty repairs done, using tarpaulin and bits of old wood. While May wasn’t looking, Clarkson hid a cow’s head in his boot in the hope that it would attract lions but this backfired when they tried to move the animal’s head to May’s tent, only to discover they’d put it in Hammond’s sleeping quarters by mistake.

  After sinking in a stagnant pond, Hammond’s car was completely flooded but he declined the offer of simply shooting the floor to let the water out. By now he had become sentimentally attached to his classic car and the other two presenters fell about laughing when he revealed that he’d named the Opel ‘Oliver’. The last laugh was with Oliver, though: after a night of extensive repairs from the flood damage, the car was raring to go, leaving Clarkson, ‘speechless for first time in 47 years.’ Afterwards they had to cross the salt flats of the Makgadikgadi Pan, which left Clarkson and May’s stripped-out cars (and eyes) filled with dust (and yes, the decision to drive over those fragile salt flats caused uproar among environmentalists; fears of an influx of boy racers flying to Botswana to copy the salt flats’ race proved unfounded, however).

  All three made it to the Namibian border, but who was the winner? None of them, it transpired, because only the dreaded VW Beetle trailing behind had actually made the entire journey without modification! It’s unlikely the £4,500 spent on the vehicles for this particular Cheap Car Challenge was even a fraction of the show’s final budget, though.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Bugatti Veyron

  When cars are sent to Top Gear for testing, it’s usually left for the manufacturer to insure the vehicle and take any subsequent damage on the chin. This is often a new set of tyres or a burnt-out clutch or brake disc and with cheaper cars, writing them off is not necessarily a problem. As former producer Jon Bentley recalls, the car makers are normally fairly laid-back – after all, they are potentially getting a very high-profile advertisement (provided the review is positive, of course): ‘The manufacturers would loan the car for about a week. In the early days, I used to worry about tyre wear. I can recall doing an item on the principles of car handling with Tiff Needell and at the end, I looked at the tyres on this BMW 535 after we’d finished filming and I was like, “Arrgghh! These tyres are in a terrible state!” I rang them up and was told not to worry about it.’

  This philosophical approach is not applied to every make of car, however. The most obvious example is the world’s fastest production car, the Bugatti Veyron. In this case, the manufacturer (actually Volkswagen) was perhaps understandably rumoured to be initially reluctant to hand over the Veyron, which sells for around the £1 million mark. This is not uncommon with such supercars. Some years earlier, the landmark hypercar that Ferrari released under their owner’s name – the F60, aka the Enzo – was considered by its maker to be inappropriate to give to Top Gear at all. The show’s producers repeatedly tried to secure a test car but the team at Maranello refused to be moved; they even asked Jay Kay but perhaps understandably, he wasn’t about to hand over his pride and joy!

  It was a full two years before they eventually succeeded with typical Top Gear guile and craft. Nick Mason, drummer with rock legends Pink Floyd, had bought an Enzo and he agreed to ‘lend’ the car to the show for testing provided they plug his new book. Of course, any programme on the BBC is not allowed to advertise so in order to comply with the licence fee, Clarkson said they would do no such thing and instead came up with a cunning plan.

  He then proceeded to reside over a feature where the greatest Ferrari ever built was described as being comparable only to Nick Mason’s new book. Both he and Mason –‘author and part-time drummer’ – held copies of the new publication while they chatted and Clarkson even waved a copy in front of Mason’s face as he talked. The ‘plug’ even came complete with a Tesco ‘Every Little Helps’-style till ring! It was very funny and somehow Top Gear managed to get away with it.

  Perhaps it wasn’t entirely without precedent when a few years later, it was whispered that Bugatti were similarly reluctant with their stunning Veyron. As a quick historical aside, the re-launch of the Bugatti marque in such a phenomenal way seemed a surprise to many, but actually the company had been there before. In 1992, the brand had launched the EB110 SS and its history and spec reads like the Veyron of some 13 years later. Back then, Bugatti’s new owner Romano Artiolo wanted to build the most technically advanced supercar ever – just as his VW counterparts did with the Veyron. Again, like the Veyron, they created brand new techniques, including the first-ever use of a carbon-fibre monocoque chassis, originally developed on French space rockets. The early 1990s’ design even had a speed-sensitive rear wing for high speed, just like the Veyron. And the price was £281,000 – in today’s money about £500,000 (some way short of the Veyron’s hefty price tag). The acceleration was 0–60 in 3.2 seconds, compared to the Veyron’s 2.5 seconds. And yes, they also called the extreme model ‘Super Sport’, too.

  Fast forward to 2005 and Bugatti once more shocked the world with their new car. The Veyron is widely regarded as the greatest production car ever built. For sheer car pornography, however, the Bugatti is the ‘Linda Lovelace’ of the road. The mind-boggling statistics are worth dwelling on momentarily, not least to explain why the three battle-hardened presenters were so keen to get their hands on one and why they genuinely salivate every time they sit in the legend. The car possesses an apocalyptical 1001bhp, which hurls it to 60mph in 2.5 seconds, on to 100 in 4.5 seconds and ultimately onwards to a top speed of 253mph. By then it’s chewing up the road at nearly 400 feet a second. Its monumental engine is basically two massive four-litre V8s strapped together with four turbos and all gelled together by slithers of VW engineering genius. To cool the colossal engine at its heart, the beast has 10 radiators that can suck in 10,000 gallons of air every minute when at full tilt. Bugatti even found that when they fitted slimmer door mirrors to try and get less drag, the nose of the car started to lift as the mirrors had been creating such downforce at that staggering top speed. The Bugatti’s moveable rear air brake generates as much braking force as a basic VW Polo; the indicator costs £4,500, the tyres will set you back about £18,000 and only last for approximately 3,500 miles – if you drive carefully. A service is in the region of £12,000.

  And yes, it’s true: the car does cost £5 million to make and then it’s sold for around the £1 million mark – a huge financial loss for the Volkswagen group, who own the marque, but a stunning piece of engineering brilliance that has quite simply redefined the very meaning of ‘supercar’. Given the constant pressure on fuel economy, the environment and safety, the Veyron may possibly never be surpassed.

  So, imagine Top Gear’s frustration when Bugatti wouldn’t allow them to test a Veyron around their test track. Over the years, plenty of gleaming supercar metal or carbon fibre has been battered there so if it did exist, then perhaps Bugatti’s initial reluctance could be forgiven. Fortunately, when they finally agreed to give the car up, boy, did Top Gear do them proud! Perhaps for no other car has the programme gone to such extreme lengths to film the most stunning features, time after time.

  It would be a full two years after the car’s initial launch when they finally got their hands on one for the Top Gear test track, but its first appearance on the show was in a brilliant race that occurred in Series 7, Episode 5, aired on 11 December 2005 (the year of the launch). The challenge was simple: what’s the fastest way to get a truffle sniffed out of the ground by a
sniffer dog in Italy all the way back to London? Clarkson had to drive across Europe in the Bugatti from Alba in northern Italy and race May and Hammond in a Cessna 182 private light aircraft, with the finishing line being a restaurant at the top of the NatWest Tower in London.

  Over the years, there have been many ‘improbable races’ but this feature still ranks as one of Clarkson’s greatest-ever performances. In this author’s opinion, it is also Top Gear’s best-ever race; they’ve run some fabulous races over the years, pitting the Nissan GT-R against a bullet train in Japan, a Mercedes Benz SLR McLaren against a passenger ferry, a Ferrari Daytona against a powerboat, as well as a variety of cars against a plethora of opponents including pigeons, skateboarders, parachutists, rock climbers, snowmobiles, greyhounds, kayaks, rollerbladers, a ‘tall man’ and of course, a snooker player but the Veyron versus a plane was the finest Top Gear race by some margin.

  Clarkson has driven hundreds, probably thousands of cars in his time and even when it’s a particularly purist Porsche or an especially bad family saloon, he seems able to muster some enthusiasm. However, the beauty of this debut Veyron feature is that he didn’t have to pretend about anything – he was in sheer heaven. From the moment he pressed the beautifully polished ‘Start’ button on Bugatti’s monster, he was in his element. The first words out of his mouth were, simply, ‘This is fast!’ Unadulterated joy was clearly visible on his face and audible in his words and as such, made for classic telly. Among the gems he came out with were his summing-up of the landmark car as, ‘a triumph for lunacy over commonsense, a triumph for man over nature and a triumph for Volkswagen over absolutely every other carmaker in the world!’ My own particular favourite was when he tried to capture just how ferocious and breath-taking the car’s acceleration was: ‘You can’t just put your foot down in this thing whenever the mood takes you … you’ve got to think, is there another car within a mile of me?’