The Top Gear Story - The 100% Unofficial Story of the Most Famous Car Show... In The World. Martin Roach
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For my two little petrol-heads,
Super Sport and Little Turbo
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: ‘Old’ Top Gear
Chapter 2: Jeremy Clarkson, Part I
Chapter 3: The Hamster and Captain Slow, Part I
Chapter 4: The ‘New’ Top Gear
Chapter 5: The Star in a Reasonably Priced Car
Chapter 6: Caravans
Chapter 7: ‘How Hard Can It Be?’
Chapter 8: The Top Gear Specials: ‘US Road Trip’
Chapter 9: The Stig: Top Gear’s Tame Racing Driver
Chapter 10: Jeremy Clarkson, Part II
Chapter 11: Top Gear Haters
Chapter 12: Cheap Car Challenges
Chapter 13: The Bugatti Veyron
Chapter 14: Richard Hammond, Part II
Chapter 15: James May, Part II
Chapter 16: Jeremy Clarkson, Part III
Chapter 17: The Crash
Chapter 18: Supercars and Top Gear
Chapter 19: The Polar Trek
Chapter 20: The Stig Versus Top Gear
Chapter 21: Nothing Changes, Nothing Stays the Same
Chapter 22: Headlines and Heat
Chapter 23: Back in the Game
Chapter 24: The Best Job in the World!
Appendices
Plates
Copyright
The author would like to generously thank Jon Bentley, David Coulthard and Dr Kerry Spackman for their interviews. Top Gear has, of course, been the subject of huge media coverage and the following sources were extremely helpful in compiling this book: The Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, The Man in the White Suit by Ben Collins, Flat Out, Flat Broke by Perry McCarthy, Top Gear magazine.
Also the brilliant fan site www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk,
www.timesonline.co.uk, style.uk.msn.com, news.bbc.co.uk,
www.petitiononline.com, www.hse.gov.uk,
www.thefutoncritic.com, transmission.blogs.topgear.com,
www.finalgear.com, www.c21media.net, web.archive.org/web,
www.webcitation.org, news.scotsman.com, www.smh.com.au,
www.theage.com.au, www.carsguide.com.au, jalopnik.com,
www.vogue.co.uk, findarticles.com,
www.computerworld.com.au, www.newstatesman.com,
uk.askmen.com, www.imdb.com, www.brunel.ac.uk,
www.thesun.co.uk, homecinema.thedigitalfix.co.uk, wikipedia.com
The official Top Gear website is at: www.topgear.com
When I was a kid, my dad drove a chocolate-brown Hillman Hunter. It had shiny, faux-leather seats and no seatbelts in the front or rear. The music system was a cartridge player which took up most of the dashboard, yet we only had an album each by The Carpenters and Elkie Brooks to play on it. Us three kids would be crammed in the back and to this day, I don’t know how we fitted everything in. We even drove to the south of France to go camping during two particularly ambitious summers – with a tent and two weeks’ supplies for a family of five in the boot. I’m not actually sure that’s physically possible, because now I’m a grown up, I seem to need a car the size of a small fuel tanker to get my small people around (which is still always full when we come back from Sainsbury’s). But back then, the trusty (rusty) Hillman got us all in, suitcases precariously tied to a creaking roof rack, and off we went over the Channel. I think it took us about 79 days to get there the first time.
My dad used to fix cars on an evening after work to bring in extra money to feed his hungry hordes so my primary-school years were a time when cars were a piece of metal to get you from A to B or to generate cash for a new pair of shoes. They were a pragmatic assistant, a necessity and nothing more. For much of my early years, I had absolutely no idea there were car ‘brands’ and the caché of a so-called ‘prestige’ marque mattered not one jot because it didn’t even register. Besides, even if I had pined for a classic badge, we simply couldn’t have afforded one.
In compiling this book, I have tried to pinpoint exactly why it is that Top Gear is so massively popular. At the time of writing, somewhere in the region of 350 million people watch each episode. That’s almost as many as Baywatch, yet Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are certainly no Pamela Andersons. Of course there are several fairly obvious reasons: the brilliant presenters, the ludicrous stunts and adventures, the road-tests, the irreverent humour and bitingly funny scripts, all these things are core staples of a globally successful formula. But there’s something more, something a little more nebulous: it’s the fact that for some reason, to a sizeable chunk of the world’s population, cars matter.
I remember vividly the very first moment when I suddenly realised this phenomenon. It was like a cloud of ignorance lifting from my eight-year-old eyes – I suddenly understood that certain cars were deemed ‘better’ than others. It happened when the music teacher at primary school bought a new car. I remember sitting in the maths class and one of the ‘trendy’ kids walked in and said, ‘Guess what? Mr Hanley has only gone and bought a Saab 900 drop-top!’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. After some explanation, I realised he meant to say, ‘Mr Hanley has only gone and bought a new car with a convertible roof.’ But he hadn’t just bought ‘a car’ – it was a Saab. And not just any old Saab, it was a 900 Series, no less … and convertible.
Suddenly, the penny dropped.
Ah, I get it …
A whole new world had just opened up for me.
Now, a good few road miles later, I sit here with that primary-school fascination for fast cars still burning brightly inside. When a supercar drives past me, I still emit the audible ‘Oooohhhh’ that the voice boxes of all genuine petrol-heads are equipped with. Or sometimes I opt for the sharp intake of breath – that works, too. When I recently saw a convertible white Bugatti Veyron in central London, I was quicker to stand next to it with my boys and get a photo than a stalker at a celebrity party.
I buy Top Gear magazine religiously and have a subscription to the kids’ edition, Top Gear Turbo – in my son’s name, of course – and yes, I ‘help’ him collect the trading cards. We once went to a toy store for a ‘friendly’ card-swapping morning with fellow collectors and I nearly had to be escorted from the shop because a dad jumped the queue for the Lambo Murcielago LP640 (‘Rare’). I was outraged on my son’s behalf, of course.
As I type this, I have a Top Gear battery-operated V8 engine pencil sharpener next to my keyboard; there’s a Stig key fob hanging from the door to my office;