The Top Gear Story Read online

  The more caricatured elements of the three characters have only really developed over the span of several series and the show’s ratings have subsequently gone up and up and up … Wilman himself was quoted in the Guardian describing them thus: ‘Jeremy is walk through a door rather than open it, Richard’s a massively accident prone and cheeky chappie, and James is a pedantic nerd.’ This was a formula that quickly proved highly successful: with the dream line-up, a healthy budget and the full backing of the BBC, new Top Gear set about becoming the most-watched and most successful motoring show of all-time.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Star in a Reasonably Priced Car

  From the very first series of the new generation of Top Gear, a brilliant slot was introduced which has since become a TV institution, the so-called ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’. The premise was simple enough: each week, a famous face would take a cheap and cheerful car around the official Top Gear track, with their respective times posted on a lap time board. Initially introduced merely as a fun piece to feature some famous faces, it was also a clever way to segue in guest appearances without the celebrity just crassly plugging their new book or film.

  The first-ever ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ was the comedian Harry Enfield. His appearance was pre-empted by Clarkson saying that normally when comedians make the big time, they go out and buy supercars yet Enfield had instead bought a Vauxhall Cavalier Convertible (which was hauled into the studio). He then swapped it for a Rover and this in turn was later exchanged for a Metro. At the time, Enfield was working the same circuit as comedians such as Rowan Atkinson (McLaren F1) and Steve Coogan (Ferrari 355). Inspired by such modest car taste, Clarkson announced the new weekly feature. He revealed that when searching for the ‘Reasonably Priced Car’, Hyundai had refused, so too had Daewoo and Nissan, but then Suzuki said, ‘Have a Liana’ – which was £9,999 on the road. Clarkson described this as the most beautiful car he had ever seen.

  First of all, however, Clarkson, Hammond and Jason Dawe all crammed into the Liana to do a lap of the Top Gear track to test out the vehicle. They recorded a time of 1.50 seconds, even with three adults on board. For the celebrities themselves, on the day The Stig would show them the racing lines and coach them around the track before each of them was allowed several attempts at a lap time, although the fastest would be (genuinely) kept a secret until they were interviewed in the studio by Clarkson.

  Enfield was not so quick: to this day he remains one of the slowest stars, with a lamentable time of 2.01. To his credit, as the opening ‘star’, he was the fastest guest celebrity on the leaderboard albeit for one week (behind The Stig and the presenters). However, with the very next episode in late October 2002, when supercar collector and accomplished racer Jay Kay of Jamiroquai fame came on the show, it quickly became apparent that for some celebrities this was not just a bit of fun. Kay has a well-documented fleet of supercars and was known to be a talented and naturally fast driver. First off, he chatted with Clarkson about how he felt his love of cars could be traced back to his famous mother’s transient lifestyle (she was the brilliant jazz singer Karen Kay) and how he therefore spent much of his childhood on tour, travelling the UK with her. He then rattled off a dream list of cars that would make most men salivate – a Merc Pullman, Ferrari 550, a Lambo Miura SC and 360 Spider, an Aston Martin DB5, etc.

  Then Jay Kay did his lap. Coming the week after Harry Enfield posted such a slow opening gambit, everyone expected Kay to handsomely beat that mark. And that’s exactly what he did: his time of 1.48.3 was only two seconds behind The Stig and came complete with a fancy handbrake turn to finish! Delighted, he punched the air in triumph (notably, this was in front of a sparse studio audience, which in the early series were only placed in front of the presenters’ chairs rather than the latter-day set-up of a 360-degree crowd). Seeing Jay Kay so excited was the moment when ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ became not just an entertaining TV slot, but a national sport.

  In the second series, however, ultra-tall supermodel Jodie Kidd astonished everyone by taking three-tenths off Jay Kay’s time, even though she could barely fit in the tiny Suzuki Liana. Perhaps viewers shouldn’t have been surprised as she was in fact a veteran of the ultra-fast American Gumball Rally and even drove a Maserati Spyder at home. She compared driving fast on the lap to being on a horse, in that it gave her the same adrenaline rush. Later, The Stig revealed that in between corners, Kidd could be heard making ‘Giddy up!’ sounds.

  The Stig told Clarkson with few notable exceptions, pretty much all the celebs he was coaching were highly competitive and keen to win (he also later revealed that in his opinion the most difficult celebrity was Tara Parker-Tomkinson as he felt she wasn’t a very good listener). However, not all celebrities are so accomplished and much of the fun of this segment is when the celeb driver is utterly useless. The late great Richard Whiteley ambled in at a woefully slow 2.06 – in fact, both he and Terry Wogan were beaten by blind Bosnia war veteran Billy Baxter, accompanied by Clarkson directing him from the passenger seat.

  But perhaps the most infamous early lap was by seasoned actor Michael Gambon towards the end of Series 1. A fan of the show from years back, despite his Shakespearian pedigree and English gentleman appearance he actually owns a Ferrari 348 (a famously difficult prancing horse to drive). He is a considered petrol-head, even taking his skills as far as flying planes and having an engineering workshop at home. Gambon said that he thoroughly enjoyed being trained by The Stig and revealed that the mystery racing driver talked in a French accent. When Gambon did his lap, he said that he didn’t even know there was a camera in the car and the look on his face – like that of an angry taxi driver – suggested he wasn’t fibbing.

  He nearly came off the track several times but the most infamous moment came on the last turn before the finish line, when he lifted up onto two wheels, nearly rolling the car over altogether (Tom Cruise and Michael McIntyre would later do the same). Forever after, that part of the track has been named ‘Gambon Corner’ in his honour. His time of 1.55 was a wet lap, which left him rather lowly on the board. Interestingly, however, although his two-wheel antics on the corner became the stuff of Top Gear legend, The Stig later said Gambon had had the best appreciation of racing lines of anyone in the series thus far. However, Clarkson later referred to the part of the leaderboard with times of 1:51 or slower as the ‘Thespian Zone’, as there were so many classically trained actors posting such slow times down there.

  Over time, the ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ feature has become a longer interview with the celebrity in question. Occasionally, however, the presenters make a diversion inspired by their guest. One such silly aside came with the foul-mouthed, but ultra-passionate chef Gordon Ramsay in Series 1, Episode 9. In the studio, Clarkson and Ramsay bemoaned women drivers and vegetarians before Jeremy announced that they had thought of a cunning plan to avoid having to eat dire motorway service station food (a pet hate of his). He’d worked out that if you taped certain cuts of meat to the engine itself and left them under the bonnet on your journey, they would cook as you drove along, thus avoiding the need to pay for vile service station food. He suggested they could even instruct the public on cooking times – for example, a rack of lamb might take two hours at 3000rpm.

  You could see Ramsay’s face drop as he then realised Clarkson had not only cooked food under the bonnets of three cars on the Top Gear test track, but also clearly wanted him to taste it. To Ramsay’s credit, he tested the food with real enthusiasm and even critiqued it, albeit saying the lamb was ‘Castrol-oily-greasy’. Perhaps he was in a good mood because his lap turned out to be the same as Clarkson’s and second only to Jay Kay at the time. Stig fans note: the food was served by the mystery man, the first time he’d been in the studio.

  Fellow celebrity chef Jamie Oliver later took his own VW Camper onto the track and The Stig belted it round the circuit while Oliver tried to prepare a salad in the back! Off-camera, The Stig then took Ol
iver round again in his own Maserati and succeeded in power sliding almost the entire circuit!

  There have been three ‘Reasonably Priced’ cars featured since 2002. For the first seven series, a Suzuki Liana was used, which as Clarkson had revealed retailed for £9,999 precisely. Each car used is the standard road version with only the addition of necessary roll bars, safety seats and harnesses, for obvious reasons.

  Apart from Gambon-esque acrobatics, the Liana also suffered a wheel falling off (when Lionel Richie and then Trevor Eve were driving), a dented boot, a broken suspension courtesy of Patrick Kielty, two destroyed clutches (David Soul) and countless mashed brake pads and tyres. For Soul’s lap, the car was redecorated in Starsky & Hutch styling with a police flashing beacon and the infamous white stripe down the side. On more than one occasion, two Lianas were used and some interviews even comprised footage of both vehicles (although the actual lap times were from a single-car lap).

  When the Doctor Who actor Christopher Eccleston came on the show, he was allowed to drive an automatic Liana as he did not have a manual licence. Worse still, when Johnny Vegas came along, he hadn’t even passed his test at all and so he was given ‘L’ plates! According to the excellent fan-site, www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk, in its entire service the Liana covered 1,600 laps of the circuit and had its tyres and brakes changed 400 times.

  The faithful Liana was replaced for the eighth series by a Chevrolet Lacetti, again retailing at around the £10,000 mark. With the lap time leaderboard now wiped clear and due to the intense competition this part of the show now attracted, the rules for celeb times were tightened, with only five practice laps allowed before a final timed lap was taken. The slowest-ever lap in this model was by Jimmy Carr, who had previously held second place in the Liana behind Ellen MacArthur, but in the Chevrolet he span off and crawled in at a snail-like 2 minutes 8.91 seconds. Billie Piper’s lap was deemed ‘incomplete’ by The Stig, who said she had not completed all the corners: after Clarkson asked the Top Gear audience, however, they allowed her time to stand.

  Then, at the start of Series 15, the Lacetti was replaced by a Kia cee’d (usually referred to by Clarkson as the ‘Cee Apostrophe D’). Rather than simply explain that they had replaced the previous car, in true Top Gear fashion the team parked the Chevrolet Lacetti under a pair of 550-feet chimneys at a Northfleet cement works and blew up the monstrous columns while the entire carnage was filmed.

  Contrary to the generalisation that is ‘The Thespian Zone’, the fastest star to date across all three Reasonably Priced Cars is the mega-moviestar Tom Cruise, who appeared in Series 15, Episode 5 during the summer of 2010. He lapped the circuit in the Cee Apostrophe D in 1.44.2, pipping his fellow guest – and co-star in the movie Knight And Day – Cameron Diaz by one second. Following Cruise’s blistering success, there were many internet rumours saying the time had been fixed so as to pander to the Hollywood heartthrob’s profile, an accusation strongly denied by the Top Gear producers. There is no evidence to suggest this: indeed, the lap was witnessed by many outside of the core backroom staff plus there are numerous stopwatches, cameras all synched up and even staff on certain parts of the track to ensure no one cuts a corner.

  Andy Wilman pointed out that Cruise had turned up early and put more time into his practice than any previous guest; he went on to say that it saddened him that people might try and take the shine off such a fun moment before vehemently refuting any accusations of fixing. It is also worth bearing in mind that Cruise has a fleet of beautiful fast cars and is known to do many of his own stunts; on the day of the lap, he even took out a Bugatti Veyron and reached 190mph on the test track so this was clearly not your everyday celebrity tottering around a lap.

  When Formula 1 stars come on the show to do a lap in the Reasonably Priced Car, they are given their own leaderboard, the assumption being it is unfair to list them next to celebrities and other non-professional racing drivers. Some observers have commented that the F1 drivers’ times are not much faster than the various famous faces topping the ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ leaderboard, but don’t be fooled. Neuroscientist Dr Kerry Spackman has worked in Formula 1 for years and explained to the author that this apparently small margin was very misleading: ‘When Damon Hill and all these Formula 1 guys go round, it isn’t that much quicker than the top [celebrity guests]. A normal car is just so jolly easy to drive; it’s so forgiving even when it catches you by surprise. If the Reasonably Priced Car starts to slide out of control, a Formula 1 driver will have enough time to yawn, make a cup of tea and think, “Oh yeah, about now I’ll give it a bit of a correction.” But that’s also why there’s no real difference between a Formula 1 driver and the top guys in a Reasonably Priced Car because the car is so benign, so simple and so easy, there’s not much you can really do [to be substantially faster]. Obviously Top Gear has had a number of celebrities turn up – there are a lot of petrol-heads out there, after all – and they all think they are pretty good but in actual fact, they have no concept, none whatsoever [of the skills of a racing driver].’

  Spackman adeptly sums up the appeal of the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment: ‘Jackie Stewart once said, “There’s only two things you can’t criticise a man for, one is his prowess in bed and the other is his driving.” So many people I’ve come across fancy themselves as being pretty good at driving but even a very good driver like a saloon or touring car champion isn’t up there with F1 drivers. The analogy I would use is that no one would ever say, “You know what? I think I’d take Nadal on in a game of tennis, I think I’d give him a good run for his money.” If you’ve ever sat in a race car with a Formula 1 driver when he’s driving in anger (I’ve sat in a car with a number of drivers), it’s incredible. Yet every man fancies themselves as a bit of a good driver.’

  The Top Gear test track was custom-designed for the show by engineers from Lotus. It is located at Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, which was built in 1942 by the 2nd Battalion Royal Canadian Engineers and constantly used during the Second World War (thereafter it fell into disuse and like many British airfields, was turned into a race track). The track has been cleverly designed to include corners that punish oversteer, others that expose understeer; there are bumps and adverse cambers in difficult places, as well as straights demanding full-throttle power that would frighten anyone but the less-than-lunatic. When Richard Hammond first introduced the track in Episode 1 and talked the viewer through the corners, he claimed this was such a cunning leveller of a car’s foibles that it made 0–60 and top speed times ‘meaningless’. However, the 1.75 miles of circuit has played host to a party of the greatest supercars ever built and to date, the top of the leaderboard suggests power still rules the day. That said, when the fastest production car ever built – the Bugatti Veyron – first went round, it came only fourth, with Clarkson citing its excessive weight as the problem.

  Some of the corners were already in situ, but others – such as Chicago and Hammerhead – have literally been painted onto the track to add extra challenges. According to Top Gear, they are repeatedly asked to host track days for fans and one can imagine the demand would be huge, but alas the track is essentially a figure-of-eight and so carnage would at some point prevail.

  The track itself is a graveyard for failed celebrity laps but also an automotive Hollywood Walk of Fame, with several corners and names for parts of the track honouring former contestants and incidents. So we have ‘Crooner Corner’ named after The Stig’s famed penchant for easy listening music. Then it’s on to Willson, so-called for former Top Gear presenter Quentin Willson, the first part of the track where inferior cars start to struggle. Chicago is named not after the Mid-Western city in the USA but for the MOR band that’s another Stig favourite; likewise Bacharach, as in Burt. Former producer and Top Gear legend Jon Bentley is celebrated with the infamous tyre wall, whose camera shakes if a car travels through fast enough. This is situated at the end of ‘The Follow-Through’, in itself the most extreme test of a driver’s
nerve on the track, with even supercars sometimes having to lift slightly to avoid oblivion. But perhaps most famous of all is Gambon – originally dubbed Carpenters after the classic genteel brother/sister duo from the 1970s. Oh, and Hammerhead is so-named because it’s shaped like a hammerhead!

  Of course, The Stig is the master around this track, but even he is sometimes beaten by the mental power of certain howling supercars. Most famously was a crash in the Koenigsegg, The Stig’s biggest mash-up (of more later). There’s a rumour that in late-2010, a computer console version of the Top Gear test track will be made available within the Gran Turismo game.

  One other prominent feature of the new Top Gear format was the so-called ‘Cool Wall’. This was one of many features introduced with the new format to get around a very pragmatic problem: it’s so much more demanding to film a car review show in the post-Millennial era because modern cars are so good. The dark days of British Leyland that Clarkson has so controversially rebuked over the years are long gone, unionists no longer control the factories and as a rule, most cars coming onto the market have had billions of pounds in development spent on them. Very few modern cars go badly wrong; some even offer ‘lifetime warranties’, so confident are their manufacturers of the quality; others bought on the high street for relatively modest amounts are quicker than the rally cars of the 1970s.

  So to some extent, Top Gear are frequently faced with the tricky problem that when a new car comes along to the marketplace, it is very well built, thoughtfully finished and altogether a soundly designed piece of engineering. This is a problem that the show’s producer Andy Wilman directly alluded to in a book that he co-wrote with Richard Hammond, What Not to Drive (2006). So, apart from stunts and specials, the stars in cars and lengthy features, the show has had to come up with other ways of reviewing cars, the basic staple item on a programme such as this. For the majority of less-glamorous cars, one way of doing this is the so-called ‘Cool Wall’.