The Top Gear Story (7 page)

T
op Gear
's lavish production does not come cheap. According to some sources, a conservative estimate for a ‘normal' show would be in excess of £100,000. However, executive producer Andy Wilman says they spend that ‘on crisps'. If the figure is wildly short of the mark, it still looks like good value to the BBC, who sell the programme on to numerous countries where it is watched by 350 million people. When you rake in the licensing, merchandising sales and rights as well as peripheral earnings, it makes for a sizeable income stream against the original cost. Given that
The Simpsons
is rumoured to cost over $1 million per episode, that might just make
Top Gear
look like the TV bargain of the century.

It's easy to see where all the money gets spent. One enduring feature of the programme has been the various madcap challenges the
Top Gear
team set themselves. At first, these challenges were more often quite short clips and stunts – a bus
jumping motorcycles, trying to run a car on poo or a nun driving a monster truck, for example. However, over time longer features started to creep in, often introduced by the presenters complaining about a certain problem within motoring, or perhaps a tricky issue facing car manufacturers preceded by the words, ‘How hard can it be?' Although the phrase was not at first an official segment of the show, repeated use has turned it into a
Top Gear
perennial and one that is usually followed by a groan from the audience as everybody knows calamity is about to strike.

A personal favourite in this category is the so-called ‘Toybota' challenge, in the third episode of Series 8. This was a frankly ridiculous, laughable yet brilliant challenge. Back in the studio, the trio had been lamenting the lack of a viable car that could also drive into and travel through water. Periodically, various zany British inventions promised to revolutionise this area of transport but let's face it, they never really caught on. Clarkson found this weird because we are, after all, an island nation and so
Top Gear
decided to do something about it.

The production team gave the three colleagues just two days to make their own amphibious cars, without actually telling them what the end challenge would be. Clarkson perhaps not surprisingly goes for the full power option, buying a Toyota Hilux truck – he named the good ship ‘Toybota', a good choice of vehicle for sure. But then he wanted to strap two mega-powerful 500bhp outboard motors to the back of it. The expert brought in to save the presenter from imminent death watched aghast and had to explain to Clarkson that so much power was enough to empty most harbours and would make his Toyota un-sailable. Undeterred, Jeremy then proceeded to try out some sample boats and until the last second still insisted that they needed twin engines. He was also averse to making any form of hull,
saying the whole point of the exercise was to make a car that could sail, rather than a boat that looked like a car.

Hammond was a little less ambitious in the power stakes and opted for a trusty/rusty VW Camper. He rolled up wearing motorbike leathers and quickly turned the traveller's van of choice into a houseboat. Then James May sailed in – literally – with his elegant Triumph Herald, complete with mast and sails. He seemed at ease with the prospect and was even said to be a ‘sailor' although it later transpired that it was 31 years since he'd last set foot in a sailing boat! However, his effort did not get off to a good start when the car wouldn't even start. Cue much hilarity from his rivals.

While all this was going on, it's hard not to reflect again on the logistics of this entirely ludicrous piece of television. For a start, the presenters would need at least three separate film crews to capture the respective efforts of each design idea. Then there would be the mechanics of each car/boat, bringing in the expertise to transform them into amphibious sea-faring vessels (although Clarkson's ‘expertise' seemed to consist of smashing the Hilux with a sledgehammer). And all the materials … and fuel … and insurance, and so on … Imagine organising all of this. The end result is a brilliant feature, but one that only lasts a small segment of a one-hour TV show.

Amid a sarcastic comment from Clarkson that, ‘It's the coldest March for 20 years because of global warming', the intrepid trio meet up at the calm, still waters of a rural lakeside. May's Herald was last to roll up and simply drove effortlessly into the water. Hammond, meanwhile, drove down a concrete ramp, broke the flywheel as he entered the water and rendered his vessel powerless before he'd even started. Eventually, he borrowed an outboard motor and they all set sail.

By this point a large crowd had gathered and to be fair, it
would make for a fairly odd sight! Ultimately, Hammond's
car-boat
capsized and he was forced to launch himself towards Clarkson's vessel for safety. However, that eventually capsized too after two miles and on the very last bend of the harbour, so it was left to May's more understated invention to ‘triumph' (although even then he only managed to reverse halfway out of the water). Of course, it was all classic
Top Gear
.

Yet in the production office, there was a sense that with a little more time and thought, the amphibious car idea might have achieved more so two series later, the idea was revisited. This time the challenge was far more demanding: to actually drive to Dover and cross the English Channel to Calais – a preposterous notion, really.

This time the cars arrived looking much more sea-worthy. So, we have Jeremy's Nissan truck – christened the Nissank – with a stabilised outboard motor and endless amounts of internal welding to make it watertight. He even added some huge metal drums to aid buoyancy and was so confident of his vessel that he took a fishing rod with him for those quiet moments when he would be miles ahead in the race! Hammond turned up in a Volkswagen Transporter, albeit only in name, as it really looked far more like a tugboat; May's vessel was the Triumph, being almost exactly the same as before with a few minor additions that he explained, but no one else really understood.

It was clear that the production team knew this was a much more difficult challenge as all three presenters were now wearing life-vests. Indeed, Clarkson's pride came before a fall as they drove into the channel only to find the high winds and choppy waves too much within a matter of minutes. Clarkson and Hammond seemed genuinely frightened while May failed abysmally to even leave the harbour side. Day One of the shoot was eventually aborted and they decided to return the next
morning when better, calmer weather was predicted. Hammond fared well initially but ultimately his car-boat sank; he and May were left drinking tea from a flask in the sea before clambering aboard Clarkson's admirably buoyant and working vessel.

With typical
Top Gear
gusto, they then announced that they were about to smash Richard Branson's one hour and forty minutes record for crossing the channel in an amphibious car, which of course they came nowhere near. However, after dodging mountainous ferries and tankers, they did eventually sight land and although they'd missed Calais, somehow they managed to scramble the odd car-boat onto dry land, much to the total bemusement of several hundred sunbathing French
holiday-makers
. They had landed in Sangatte, the highly controversial French town mostly famed in Britain for the illegal immigrants who used to stream across to the UK from this port. One is left to imagine how Jeremy Clarkson and his famously acid tongue explained to the watching Frenchmen what they were doing.

In the
Top Gear
studio perched on a sloping pedestal sits another battered old Toyota Hilux, the star of one of the show's most popular challenges ever: is the Toyota pick-up truck really indestructible? It was way back in Series 3, Episode 5 when the team first screened an Australian advert for the truck and pointed out that all the anti-American militia around the world seem to be filmed on BBC News driving those faithful old pick-ups, packed full of machine guns. So, in an attempt to find out just how strong the Toyota was, the trio bought a 13-year-old Hilux 2.4 litre Diesel for £1,000, with over 190,000 miles on the clock.

The team then put together a series of what can only be termed multiple attempts at grievous bodily harm on the unsuspecting truck. So we see them driving it down steep stony stairs, scraping it along walls, crashing into a (soon-to-
be-notorious
) chestnut tree, leaving it standing in the Severn
Estuary as the tide came in, dropping it from a crane, driving it through a wooden shed (the
Top Gear
production office, apparently), dropping a caravan onto its roof, smashing a demolition crane's wrecking ball into its rear and even setting fire to it. Amazingly, after all the abuse, it still worked!

The feature actually over-ran the episode because the truck refused to be killed. So, in the sixth part of the series, we witnessed the finale: they put the pick-up on top of a tower block, which was then demolished (how did it get there?) with Andy Wilman's ‘£100,000 just for crisps' budget. After the rubble and dust had settled, a mechanic came on site and without spare parts and only the aid of basic tools, he spent a brief few minutes under the bonnet. He reconnected the battery, put some diesel in it… Yes, it still worked! Clarkson called it ‘automotive greatness'.

Aside from the brilliant television feature, it doesn't take a genius to work out the commercial effect of 350 million viewers around the world seeing this remarkable machine treated to such abuse only for it still to work. All hail the Toyota Hilux, one of
Top Gear
's greatest-ever features!

Perhaps one of the series' most famous and brilliantly executed challenges was when the team decided to turn a Robin Reliant into a Space Shuttle (although they did not actually ask the
ill-fated
question, ‘How hard can it be?', this stunt certainly falls into that category). I can't quite imagine the production meeting when the idea first came up but clearly no one dismissed it as absurd, so in Episode 4 of Series 9 (a very strong period for such mad features), we have the team working with space engineers to create the impossible: a three-wheel re-useable space rocket built from a car normally associated with Peckham's finest market traders. Perhaps only
Top Gear
could think of this and certainly,
only
Top Gear
would actually go and do it! The show's production notes class this as ‘easily
Top Gear
's most ambitious film'.

Again, like the ‘Toybota' feature, this is a stunning example of a clearly ludicrous idea being executed with considerable cost and precision. Despite the hilarious premise, they set about the challenge with no expense spared. The mechanical process started from a fairly simplistic base with Hammond saying they chose the Reliant because it was light, cheap and ‘pointy'. The team called on the skills of The Rocketeers – the same team who helped them send a Mini down a ski-jump in an earlier challenge.

Very quickly, however, the project escalated and within a few seconds of screen time, we are shown an engineer's workshop containing a complex structure with a maze of high-quality welding and metal components carefully woven into its framework. Huge solid rocket fuel boosters towered above the Robin Reliant. Hammond and May were clearly stunned by the progress (Clarkson was absent, having declared this the most stupid idea ever and so he refused to get involved). For all the hilarity, this was not an actual gag – if successful, the Robin would become the largest non-commercial rocket
ever
to be launched in Europe.

Next up, they went to a high-tech wind tunnel where at first they just stood in it with the
Top Gear
dog (complete with goggles), but soon the boffins joined them to put a scale model of the Robin Reliant through its paces in order to check aerodynamic prowess. Needless to say, it was pretty useless and the bespectacled boffin-type offered no glimmer of optimism for its chances in space.

Pushing the boundaries still further, a scale model of the Robin was made and attached to a very expensive remote control plane, the idea being that once the rocket had flown in space, it would need guiding back to earth for its landing (even the
usually daring Richard Hammond was not about to climb into this machine). So by now they had involved rocket engineers, remote control champion racers and tech-mad wind-tunnel geniuses.

The launch site was on a military base in Newcastle and once more the costs kept racking up: so we saw cranes, haulage trucks and endless personnel putting the Robin Reliant rocket in place. Despite the comic overview, the stunt was in fact highly dangerous, not least due to the presence of the volatile solid fuel mix of nitrous oxide and rubber – essentially laughing gas and old tyres. Worse still, the launch site was a military base renowned for having scores of unexploded bombs hidden underground.

Finally, the big moment came and Hammond and May were visibly exhilarated when the rocket launched into the sky. It was truly glorious and when the solid rocket fuel boosters detached on command, the engineers and presenters quite literally danced for joy. Their joy turned to despair as the second-phase rockets failed to detach and the overly heavy car-shuttle plummeted to earth, hitting the ground and exploding into a massive fireball. In the meteoric collision, nothing was left. The car was completely destroyed, but one badly burnt wing with a Union Jack sticker intact was recovered and now sits in the
Top Gear
office.

So, being critical, they didn't succeed in the challenge of making a re-useable space shuttle from a Robin Reliant. Apart from the fact that it's a pretty big ask, they did complete their challenge but for the final failure, though. So we are left with the teasing question: had the second-phase rockets detached on schedule, would the shuttle have landed safely and been a total success? We'll never know and it's pretty likely that BBC budgets will prevent them from ever trying again …