Improving On Top Gear Mistakes

Part of the charm of Top Gear, which won so many fans, is they commit many yahoo-level mistakes. Bubba type mistakes. The kind that result in hilarious darwin awards. As Top Gear are serious car enthusiasts, who pull no punches when a car sucks, and wax rhapsodic when they are good, it is often a good idea to see them get reviewed. If you believe in your vehicle, you may get a lot of sales. The Ford Fiesta and Focus both got very popular due to Jeremy Clarkson liking them. There was a chase through a shopping mall. And a marine amphibious landing on a beach.

Clarkson, May and Hammond have participated in some funny contests where they buy and modify a vehicle to some task they've been set by the producers. They hate trailers (what they call Caravans) and slow RVs so they built fast RVs out of cars they've modified. And it might have been okay to work if they hadn't opted to utterly mock the entire thing. Blessed comedy that it was.

Pictured is clarkson's 3-story tower on wheels. A terrible idea, but it does make a comedic point about the absurdity of some RVs being too tall. Hammond's was the most realistic, yet fails utterly because it was mocking expansion panels (slideouts) taken to extreme. May's was too small, but he did make the point that there is such a thing as too much minimalism. May's would have worked better with some curtains, and Hammonds with a couple tent pop outs for his bed rather than panels that fell down. None of these was a truck camper, after all, which would have been perfectly fine, and able to move at proper traffic speed without any trouble. Showing one of those would have proven their point that there is an RV type they don't object to.

In later series, such as the Africa challenge they do a variation of minimalist RV conversion, turning their station wagons into RVs rather than stay in really horrible African hotels. Its fairly reasonable considering how little space they have to work with. They do this sleeping conversion again with big trucks for the Burma special. They'd gotten better at it by that point, though Hammond would have been well served to remove about 4 feet of metal railing and about 1500 pounds of dead weight from his truck. It would have helped with the speed too. Poor May didn't realize how fragile his truck was, and while the crane was really important later, he needed to fix up the suspension and transmission more than it needed to be painted yellow. Live and learn.

They once got told to build amphibious cars and then cross 2 miles of water on a reservoir. That doesn't sound that hard, but they forgot that you still have to cool an engine, as well as get a metal car to float on water. Floating works by displacement, of the density of the object in the water displacing enough water that the object weighs less than the water that was there. This is why things can sink in the Sargasso Sea (Bermuda Triangle). Top Gear forgot that just because you welded some doors shut, or sprayed foam in, you don't necessarily displace enough water to float. This was unfortunate since James May had a good idea, with the sailboat. Being a music major rather than an engineer, he did not know he needed a keel, and did not realize you can install one with a tall slat for it. Its pretty trivial. Looking at that video most people can see ways to improve it.

Most people can think of ways to make a car that floats well enough to cross a lake. Probably better than this. And its a good engineering challenge, too. When Top Gear drove across southern Africa, in the Botswana special, they did it in cars without 4WD and the real lesson there is that 2-wheel drive is enough if the cars are light enough weight. The power is a lot less important than the weight.

I mention this because Clarkson revealed in Australia during an interview last week, that he's in talks with "an American internet company" and while he can't say which one, Netflix has the money to pay for his budget and let him work without the hassles of the BBC. He will have to drive more Japanese cars because we don't have French ones here. And Fiat only sells the 500 in this country. He may need to find nice things to say about Lexus because we don't buy silly english-german royalty cars here. I suspect that when he drives a new 2016 Corvette Stingray he may have to admit is a good car. Clarkson discovered that driving American trucks is actually both comfortable and fun.

And cheap. Compared to the sort of muscle cars he's used to, American trucks are very affordable. This baffled him because he didn't want to like them, but he did anyway. It might be good for Clarkson to drive on the best roads, the ones he missed on prior short visits to America, and maybe tour the Pacific Coast Highway, since he's never mentioned Big Sur. He's never talked about Highway 395 from Mohave up to Bridgeport. Very pretty, though the southern bit is a different highway. 395 goes through the middle of the desert before meeting I-15 out near Barstow. It follows the back of the Sierras at Owens Lake junction north. Fantastic views and scenery, and no lions try to eat you. You don't get kidnapped and beheaded like in Muslim countries. Its perfectly safe as long as you have water and a cellphone. There's a lot of highways he could review, with nice fast speed limits and changing radius turns that will wreck bad drivers. Even north 49 is like that. Clarkson and company would like driving that road. And maybe he can do some more comedy with RVs and such, with his mistakes up against something modern as a competing vehicle. Sort of like the VW bug in Africa. The one that went everywhere, unmodified, and never broke down. I'd love to see Top Gear do the Baja 1000 in an unmodified "Hitler-mobile". They have a class for that, btw. No kidding. It would be hilarious to see the Top Gear guys deal with that. Whatever they end up calling the new show. BBC owns Top Gear as a trademark.

I hope they'll show more of America off in the new show, and maybe taunt American car companies into raising their standards. Ditch the straight axle. Go wishbones all around. Halfshafts to correct torque steer on front wheel drive cars. Make Clarkson take part in a fuel economy race, just to hear him curse about it. He's funny when he's mad. I expect the various US internet companies have the sort of money needed to get him and his co-presenters back to work again. And maybe with more programming than the ever-shorter seasons under BBC. We'll see.