The Top Gear Story (14 page)

W
hen 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?’

Meanwhile, Hammond and May stumbled about doing lengthy pre-flight checks on the Cessna. In October 2006, James had obtained a light aircraft pilot’s licence having trained at White Waltham Airfield. Here at the airport he was filmed at ease and enjoying himself, while Hammond was frustrated and impatient to get airborne. This episode as good as any portrays their
hilarious ‘double act’, the perfect foil for Clarkson’s ‘bad guy’ image – a motoring Laurel and Hardy, if you will.

After leaving Italy, Clarkson headed into ‘car hating’ Switzerland and was so confident about victory that he stopped off for tea – although the feature notably doesn’t mention the number of petrol stops he would have had to make (using Bugatti’s own statistics, the car’s petrol consumption is between eight and thirteen miles per gallon, falling to three miles per gallon at higher speeds). He also takes up time phoning for an insurance quote, only to find that the ‘happy’ man on the other end of the line thought the Bugatti was a Rover! Because the car didn’t come with a Bluetooth device – standard even in most cheap cars these days – Clarkson had to wear one of those annoying ear-pieces to make this call. For the purposes of this book, the author successfully obtained a quote for a Bugatti and if you drive like a nun and have never had a speeding ticket of any description, it would set you back just over £25,000 a year!

The comedy was ramped up as Hammond berated the ramshackle plane while May then admitted he had had to land because he was not qualified to fly in the dark. James himself has owned two planes: a Luscombe 8A Silvaire (now sold) and an American Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon, allegedly with the registration number G-OCOK, a crafty reference to his catchphrase (such as it is) on the show of ‘Oh, cock!’

After revealing May’s night-time flying curfew, a frantic rush to the Eurostar and eventually a Routemaster ‘dash’ across London ensued, only for the duo to discover that Clarkson had already arrived at the restaurant at the top of the NatWest Tower with enough time to spare to order a pint and his pasta … with truffles, of course.

Then Clarkson summed up what he calls ‘the best car ever made’ in what is probably his greatest-ever impassioned speech
with the words: ‘It’s a hollow victory, because I’ve got to go for the rest of my life knowing that I’ll never own that car; I’ll never experience that power again.’ Mind you, Jeremy’s now so successful and famous that maybe one day that will change. So, was James May suitably impressed by all this hyperbole? No, he was asleep …

As an aside, this trip is a great example of how seamlessly edited
Top Gear
can be. When you step back from the exciting race, you have to ask how they get the shots of the car speeding along picturesque roads, or in this case the footage of May flying his ‘toaster with wings’, as it was called. The simple answer is that after the presenters have completed their actual race, the film crew go back and painstakingly shoot footage to embellish the programme’s aesthetics. Clarkson has gone on record to state that the programme’s races are never fixed and cited one example of a cameraman having to urinate in a bottle because there was no opportunity to slow down and relieve himself properly. In this case, the Bugatti was deemed so powerful that they actually sent The Stig to safely complete the extra footage.

As we have seen, in a later article for
The Sunday Times
, Clarkson intimated he’d actually tried to take the Veyron to its top speed of 253mph, but had run out of road at 240mph. Given the only roads in Europe where those speeds are legal are on the Autobahn in Germany, we can only presume that’s where he took a detour to try out the full force of Bugatti’s masterpiece.

The next time we see the team playing with the Veyron is when
Top Gear
wanted to test out its claimed top speed of 253mph. So who was chosen for this task? Why, the man christened Captain Slow, of course: James May. Actually, he did have ‘previous’. In fact, James has travelled faster than any of the other presenters, reaching 1,320mph in a RAF Eurofighter Typhoon for his programme,
James May’s 20th Century
. He’s even been to the
edge of space, travelling in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane to a height of 70,000 feet, which also makes him one of the highest humans in history, other than actual spacemen.

So in Series 9, Episode 2, May found out if the Veyron did exactly what it said on the tin and achieved that ridiculous speed of 253mph. This makes James May one of the fastest drivers in history, even including professional racers. Bugatti are rumoured to have a little book of those who they can confirm have achieved such a speed.

James had, in fact, topped 200mph several times before in numerous supercars on the show but this was far more bizarre: ‘What I found weird about it, and this will seem absurd, is that 253mph feels a lot faster than 200mph,’ he revealed in the
Daily Mail
, ‘At 250, it suddenly gets to the point where things are happening faster than you can process the information.’ Yet he became so accustomed to the staggering top speed that he found when he’d slowed right down to 70mph that it felt so pedestrian that he almost opened the door and got out, while waiting for it to roll to a halt. He maintains the Veyron’s engineering is so perfect that reaching such a speed was in fact relatively easy.

May is making light of his achievement, however. Speaking exclusively for this book, the eminent neuroscientist and motorsport expert Dr Kerry Spackman explained why driving at such prodigious speeds is deceptively difficult: ‘It’s not just the sheer speed, it’s the visual richness coming by. So if you’re in a jumbo jet going 500mph, and you’re looking out of the window at this great big fluffy cloud in the distance going by, it’s no big deal because it’s not visually rich, the clouds are big and they go past at a distance. However, when you’re close to the ground and certain things are going by at a very high speed, your brain gets overloaded. What tends to happen then is you get tunnel vision where everything outside a certain area isn’t processed: you can
see it but your brain just decides there’s just too much going on out there; all it can really focus on is what’s immediately in front of it in a small area. So you can see everything but you can’t do anything with that vision, the brain says it’s all too complicated to deal with.