For the moment we've got these four videos — about 27 minutes or so. If they go down, or if you want to watch the rest — feel free to hit the YouTubes and pop a new video in the comments below. Thus, where we get the "Open YouTube Thread" we speak of in the headline above. Enjoy.

“Can art show how a car feels, rather than simply how it looks?” May asks and the short answer is: not really. Cars are notoriously hard to turn into art (bright swatches of paint on racing BMW’s do not count). Whether in photographic or painted or filmed form, the car can almost always be counted on never to transcend itself.

The same cannot be said of humans. Take Steve McCurry’s portrait of Sharbat Gula, better known as the Afghan Girl, which has appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic Magazine and about a million other places since. It is a portrait which transcends magazine covers, girls and Afghanistan to show warfare at its 20^th century industrial worst.

Maybe what’s going on here is that humans, due especially to their facial musculature, can convey a wide range of emotions while cars are simply inanimate objects.

Except that they aren’t. Cars cruise and break and rush and dash and turn and race and oversteer and blow up and rust. Perhaps not quite as broad a range of expression as allowed by subtle twinges of the levator labii superioris muscle, but enough to get started on.

May’s take on the matter:

A skilled portrait photographer can produce an image of a film star and tell us something about what that film star is like as a person. There must be a way of doing this with cars. This is an unexplored avenue of expression that could add to the sum of human understanding, a bit.

This only works with significant cars, of course, because only they have something to tell us. I struggle to see how a Kia Sedona could be depicted as anything other than a spacious mobile box.

As a first exercise in the search of cars as art, I collected a gallery of photos which depict Porsche 911’s in ways which perhaps rise above mere pictures of cars and bare the beauty and flaws of this decades-old icon of German engineering.

This is, of course, an invitation to post better examples here in the comments.

Photo Credit: falxone evans/Flickr, Steve McCurry

Stirring up a scandal, the country's second largest newspaper, The Daily Mail, is breathlessly reporting the news, saying stuff like "fakery row," "orchestrated fake" and "set up."

"The whole event was set up," said the man who provided the fake police helicopter. "It was completely scripted, there was no real emergency - we were hired to play along." Continuing to explain that while it appeared that May, who has no experience flying airships, was in control, a professional pilot was actually in charge during the trickier maneuvers.

Incredulous that viewers don't realize Top Gear is a scripted television show, a BBC Spokesperson responded, "As an entertainment programme, Top Gear prides itself on making silly films that don't pretend to represent real life. Any suggestion it deliberately misled viewers is patently ludicrous."

Next thing you know, someone's going to try and tell us the Jaguar X-Type isn't the best car...in the world or that Richard Hammond's teeth aren't real. [via The Daily Mail]

The show's ticketing website states, "Each booking requires equal amounts of men to women, so please ensure that you have a 50/50 split of guys and gals in your party."

The BBC is adamant the rule isn't intended to be discriminatory, saying, "There is nothing sinister going on. Viewers don't want to just look at a load of ugly men."

But that's not enough for gay rights advocates. One such group, Stonewall, stated, "It's very odd, but what do you expect from pigs that grunt? Regrettably, with Jeremy Clarkson involved, it's not surprising. The show itself is full of stereotyping of both men and women." [via The Mirror]

For the moment we've got these four videos — about 32 minutes or so. If they go down, or if you want to watch the rest — feel free to hit the YouTubes and pop a new video in the comments below. Thus, where we get the "Open YouTube Thread" we speak of in the headline above. Enjoy.

[Autocar]

For the moment we've got these four videos — about 38 minutes or so. If they go down, or if you want to watch the rest — feel free to hit the YouTubes and pop a new video in the comments below. Thus the "Open YouTube Thread" we speak of in the headline above. Enjoy.

For the moment we've got these four videos — the first 37 minutes or so. If they go down, or if you want to watch the rest — feel free to hit the YouTubes and pop a new video in the comments below. Thus the "Open YouTube Thread" we speak of in the headline above.

Part I of IV

Part II of IV

Part III of IV

Part IV of IV

And unfortunately, that's all we got for now. Have a more complete set of YouTube vids? Drop in the comments below. Until next week...good night!

Like the AK-47 assault rifle and the RPG–7 bazooka, the Toyota pickup truck has become an icon of irregular armies worldwide. When mounted with an anti-aircraft cannon or a rocket laucher on its bed, it is called a technical and technicals have helped militas wage and win war against armies equipped with mechanized divisions. There was even a conflict in 1987 called the Toyota War, in which Chad’s Toyota-equipped troops defeated Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Libyan army.

The practice is not local to Africa. In Afghanistan, it was an influx of Toyota pickups from Pakistan’s ISI spy agency which transformed the Taliban from a Kandahar militia to a force which took over most of Afghanistan with remarkable speed, defeating established mujahideen commanders with decades of experience.

This has nothing to do with good guys, bad guys or tribal affiliations and all to do with the Toyota pickup’s extreme reliability on hostile terrain. You have no doubt seen the famous Top Gear episode where a Toyota Hilux is subjected to every manner of destructive testing short of a thermonuclear explosion yet it keeps on ticking—but you may not have seen this image from 2002, where US Special Forces soldiers ride in a quad cab Toyota identical to the ones used by their Taliban foes:

But all that may be about to change.

The only clue is a few pixels of an illustration which accompanies Seymour Hersh’s latest piece for The New Yorker, where he reports on the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal—or its lack thereof. It was created by the acclaimed French illustrator Guy Billout and if you lean in close, the truck you see the Taliban soldiers riding in is rather striking:

It’s not a Toyota. It’s a quad cab Dodge—a Dakota to my untrained eye, but it could be a Ram as well. This might be an inconsequential detail if the magazine in question was not The New Yorker, famous for their fact checking team. And the truck is definitely not some sort of generic placeholder pickup: it has a Dodge grille.

Cooperation between American companies and the Taliban would not be without historical precedent. Back in 1995 before they conquered Kabul and became host to Al-Qaeda, Unocal executive Marty Miller was involved in negotiations with the Taliban leadership for a natural gas pipeline which was to run from Turkmenistan to Pakistan, straight through Taliban territory. While the deal eventually fell through, Miller visited Kandahar several times and at one point even had Taliban leaders flown to Houston for Christmas, of all holidays.

Perhaps Toyota, with its humbling losses and its exit from Formula One, has gone over the hill—while Chrysler has found itself a particularly lucrative market for trucks, where demand for new vehicles is guaranteed not by rebates but by American firepower. And nobody likes to stick with a loser. Least of all the Taliban.

Photo Credit: SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images, TERENCE WHITE/AFP/Getty Images, Paula Bronstein/Getty Images, Guy Billout, EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images, U.S. Air Force

Lego Stig is part of a grand series of racing minifigs, most of them based on Formula One drivers:

Photo Credit: Phil Birkitt

Bizarrely, Top Gear apparently refused to feature the Ultima GTR because they thought it couldn't clear a speed bump. To drive home the roadability of the GTR, Ultima drove the vehicle to and from the Top Gear track in Surrey, a feat the track-only Ferrari FXX and many other supercars featured on the show likely couldn't manage.

The Ultima GTR famously holds the Guinness world record for 0-100-0 MPH, achieving the acceleration and braking run in just 9.4 seconds. There's no secret to the vehicle's performance; it's powered by a 720 HP chevy small block and weighs just 2,160 Lbs. In comparison, the FXX makes 860 HP and weighs 2,546 Lbs.

The company stated:

British supercar manufacturers and multiple world speed record holders Ultima Sports Ltd have this week smashed Michael Schumacher's £1million Ferrari FXX track car lap record on the circuit as used by Top Gear TV with their Ultima GTR720 road car.

The Ultima GTR720 recorded a blistering 1min 9.9secs lap time, which demolishes the previous record of 1min10.7secs set by seven-time world Formula 1 champion Michael Schumacher in his Ferrari FXX track car. To put things into perspective the Ultima is almost 10 seconds per lap faster than the fastest road car that Ferrari produces which is the renowned £450,000 Enzo.

The successful lap record attempt was independently timed, verified and recorded by Plans Motorsport using their GPS DL-1 data logging equipment. It wasn't a test conducted by Top Gear TV themselves as the producers have seemingly ignored repeated requests to feature the British Ultima GTR to date.

"We are all absolutely thrilled with this lap record. I could see that the Formula 1 inspired Ferrari FXX looked supremely quick in the hands of Michael Schumacher, but I had every belief that it wasn't a match for our legendary Ultima GTR720 road car. I wanted to prove a point from the minute I witnessed the Schuey lap time on TV but the top gear track was fully booked for several months. At the first available opportunity we took our Ultima GTR720 road car that has previously recorded a lap time of 1min12.8secs (see www.ultimasports.co.uk/Content.aspx?f=record8) and adjusted it to more of a track biased set up rather than road car settings in the same manner as Michael Schumacher's track only non road legal Ferrari FXX. Our Ultima GTR720 road car stormed around the track at the kind of pace that would have placed it at the front of the grids in international GT racing, it was for sure a spectacle to behold. To better the lap time of the greatest driver of our generation in arguably the worlds most developed and expensive modern day track car is a perfect illustration of the sheer brilliance and mind blowing pace of our British Ultima GTR. Of course unlike the Ferrari FXX, which is not road legal, we were able to drive our road car back home afterwards. I would also like to clarify to everybody that our GTR720 will clear all speed humps and anybody whom doubts this fact is welcome to visit our factory so that we can demonstrate this to them first hand."

Ted Marlow, Managing Director of Ultima Sports Ltd commented:
"Well what can I say? I have been driving Ultima's now for over 25 years in hundreds of different Ultima cars with a huge range of different configurations and so I was pretty confident that the GTR720 would do the business.
The Enzo FXX is no ordinary Ferrari having been developed using Formula 1 technology and extensively tested by the 7 times Formula 1 world champion so to beat this lap time certainly proves the magnitude of our achievement.
The Ultima is a perfect illustration of the effectiveness of the KISS principle and enables us to offer an affordable supercar that can outrun the likes of Michael Schumacher in his own £1million Ferrari FXX track car. Simply put we have created automotive history by producing the worlds fastest all round road legal supercar and this new record together with our extensive catalogue of existing world speed records is unequivocal proof of the Ultima GTR's engineering excellence. Ultima fans can rest assured in the knowledge that we still have significant room for lap time improvement in the future as there is always our 800hp variant to put through its paces yet, and of course the keys to our Ultima GTR720 are always available here for a certain Mr. Schumacher should he like a shot at improving our new lap time record further still........."

The Ultima GTR720 is a fully road going production car with standard features such as air conditioning, stereo system and sealed luggage compartments etc and is often used as a daily driver. The car is equipped with a standard production 720bhp Chevrolet V8 engine option built specifically for Ultima by our OE engine suppliers American Speed.

What's next? Well we are all very content and absolutely delighted here at the factory. Over the past several years we have set a catalogue of world beating times including several world speed records which remain unbeaten. We have superb worldwide demand for our product with full order books and this is where we will focus our time and effort by continuing to provide our existing loyal customers and new customers with a first class service. Previous testing has shown that we can also take the Nurburgring lap record with a road legal lap time somewhere in the region of 6mins30secs which sure is tempting to prove someday although there are no plans set as yet......

[via Ultima]

BBC film crew frantically raced to the scene to check whether James May and the rest of the crew were injured. Although they were unable to reach the airship, a helicopter filming the stunt gave them the all clear.

The stunt was believed to be the end of a race between James May in an airship and co-presenter Richard Hammond in a Lamborghini. Hammond is believed to have not hurt his head in any way this time. We think. But he still likes asparagus. (Hat tip to Eric!) [via Daily Mail]

In addition to being fairly unoriginal, Marty McFly owns the manure shtick, we can't help but notice that they're against global warming and yet dropped a bunch of methane-producing material on his front step. Might as well have tried to spray old CFC hairspray in his face. [Gaurdian]

Over two million individual bricks have been used in the project so far, with another million planned for completion. As you can see, they're assembled into larger, hollow building blocks that are then stacked to create the walls. Small window bricks are interspersed throughout the structure to help bring light inside, while a wooden frame appears to support the entire structure. Once it's completed, May will move in for two to three days, where he'll sleep on a Lego bed, pee in a Lego toilet and wash himself in a Lego bath.

"If I wake up buried under a pile of bricks, I'll know it's gone wrong," says the Top Gear presenter. [via The Daily Mail and Flickr]

Caterham R500 immortalised – in LEGO
The Caterham Superlight R500 won accolades across the board in 2008, including the prestigious Top Gear Car of the Year.

But you know you've really made it when you're built in LEGO.

LEGOLAND designers were so impressed by the R500's achievement in winning the BBC's top motoring decoration last year that it decided to capture the moment in its famous coloured plastic bricks.
Taking their place within the 40 million-brick MINILAND, one of a number of attractions at LEGOLAND, Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, plus the elusive Stig, can be seen huddled around the famous Caterham Seven in a motorsport-themed area.

As well as gaining the Top Gear award, the £38,000 Caterham Superlight R500 proved its giant-killing potential by outpacing supercars like the £1 million Bugatti Veyron.

LEGOLAND'S chief model maker, Guy Bagley, said: "My colleague remembered that the Stig had put the R500 through its paces and how incredible it was on the track. It's such a timeless and iconic car that it was a ‘no-brainer' as our choice for the motorsport area, having already decided to feature Top Gear. Its design lends itself particularly well to our bricks, too."

We'll let Jared explain:

Why'd we do it? (Why the hell not?):

A) It's never been done before,
B) we love wagons, and
C) we wanted to see what we could accomplish with a high degree of sophistication but with only a conservative effort.

Jon, Matt, Chris and I are all car nuts, and we all feed off the buzz surrounding something we'd actually want— so we were all familiar with how it's fed to us, and Chris, being a young but but died-in-the-wool car guy, was a good BS meter.

Matt DuVall, a Digital Arts major at SCAD and a summer intern, found a pre-existing, free 3D Cayman model, downloaded it, and created the Shooting Brake/hatchback shape using the 3D animation software Maya. We were fastidious with the details: Porsche development wheels, license plate number, tape on the front headlights and a front bumper that mimicks the newest 2011 mule shots, etc. It's definitely a
polarizing design—Some people love it, some hate it, but we wanted it to feature enough cues from the Panamera's design vocabulary to pass as a potential Porsche product, so we did spend a good bit of time on that part. Ultimately, it was all rendered in HD— and then downgraded in size and quality to appear like it was shot with a cameraphone and output in FinalCut Pro. Ditto with the audio.

We shot the clip in a Brooklyn (Greenpoint) back-alley to stage the car being parked against the wall of a decaying industrial loading dock— I added the Italian soundtrack to give things an appropriate Euro twist. Matt shot HDR to get the reflections right on the car, which meant shooting 360-degrees with a still camera with a fish-eye lens mounted and stitching it all together in Photoshop.

There was also a little Easter egg that no one picked up on— there is a Stig helmet partially visible in the rear hatch at about the 9 second mark. Perhaps too hidden.

Once the car was created in 3D, it was easy to generate a fake screenshot from existing previews of Forza 3 (soon to be released by Xbox in Oct). Turn 10, Forza's developers, also happen to be releasing official screenshots on a regular basis, so it was easy enough to create a plausible shot and build off the buzz from the existing waves of fan frenzy.

Jon Masters, another summer intern who is finishing his Masters in Media Studies at The New School, produced the campaign seeding strategy— placing links to the video in Porsche enthusiast sites, tipping Autoblog, Jalopnik, etc. and inserting the Forza 3 screenshot in the requisite fan forums (original posted on a Czech Forza fansite, in Czech, to add a layer of deception and plausability).

The 3rd and final round of scam will be fully-rendered stills, with a fake "behind-the-scenes" shot from a supposed studio press shoot. These will hit the public in the next day or so, when they're done and good. [This was written before these shots were released]

Here's the full timeline of the scam:

7/08/09

8:29AM- Video/Blog Post goes live on Topgear.com
1:00PM- Story submitted by dummy to reddit.com
1:15PM- Story submitted by dummy to digg.com
1:50PM- Thread submitted by dummy on www.planetporsche.net Cayman chat forum
2:45PM- Thread submitted by dummy on porscheclubgbforum.com Cayman chat forum
3:19PM- First reference (user comment) that questions video's authenticity (on TG US site)
3:30PM- Anonymous "tip" submitted to Autoblog.com tip service
4:09PM- Email "tip" sent by dummy to worldcarfans.com (linked URL included is from a german car web aggregator that picked up story)
5:30PM- Story picked up by Jalopnik without being artificially tipped (We're just THAT good. —Ed.)
6:58PM- Story run by AutoBlog
7:56PM- Breaks on Car Lounge forum on Motive

7/09/09
5:00AM- Story hits TopGear UK site (staff uninformed of hoax)
9:10AM- Worldcarfans runs story (headline questions authenticity
10:06AM- Car and Driver runs blog story
2:26PM- Czech Forza fansite seeded from dummy account
3:30PM- XBox fansite seeded with Forza 3 thread
5:30PM- Forza Central fan site seeded, referencing Czech-based image

07/10/09

11:30PM- Jalopnik tipped by dummy account to link of Forza screenshot
12:30PM- Jalopnik runs story linking Forza screenshot to TopGear mule video

07/13/09

6:00PM- Autoblog runs Forza screenshot

07/31/09

11:30AM- Cayman studio photos uploaded to dummy flickr account

08/06/09

10:00AM- Jalopnik tipped with links to flickr account
11:00AM- Jalopnik runs story
3:00PM- Worldcarfans.com tipped with flickr account
6:00PM- Worldcarfans.com runs article

And here's a breakdown of the traffic that Top Gear netted from all this:

Stats: (In less than one week)
Over the 27,000 views of the video (in our TopGear vid-player)
Over 400 comments (net wide)
29,000+ views on Jalopnik alone

Mystery Cayman Mule (from 7/8 - 8/10):
- 37,098 total plays 24,006 from embedded player
13,092 from reg player

Total
Jalopnik-
Video: 24,057 views, 52 comments
Screenshot: 13,626 views, 76 comments,
Photo: 15,076 views, 143 comments
autoblog-
video: 51 comments
screenshot: 38 comments
worldcarfans-
video: 22 comments
photo: 47 comments

Yet again, Jalopnik comes out on top. In, you know, excitement over a story even we said was probably fake.

Reports claim the accident, which occurred Saturday around noon, is said to have involved a BMW 3-Series, a Volvo V40, and a Nissan Almera, as well as Hammond's Morgan. BBC spokespeople are quoted only as saying the presenter had been involved in a minor collision and was unharmed. Phew! (Hat tip to Mike!) [Yahoo! UK]

In many ways, this episode of Top Gear was one of the most-Jalopnik ever — featuring a very American petrolhead, an El Camino and a poignant good-bye to super cars and perhaps to one of the most well-known auto journalists...in the world.

For starters, as we told you here first, Jay Leno was the season closer "Star In A Reasonably Priced Car." Pretty funny segment, but for the most part there wasn't any news. Sorry folks, Leno's not the fastest around the Top Gear track. But fear not — there's more than just big chins in this final episode of the season.

There's also some serious horsepower in the form of a head-to-head comparo between the Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst and the HSV Maloo.

Finally, if you are a petrolhead in possession of an electronic screen, you will no doubt have a list of favorite Top Gear moments, made possible by the show’s relentless pursuit of uncompromising cinematography. The images which play a backdrop to the Aston Martin V12 Vantage driven by Clarkson are perhaps the ultimate expression of the visual style honed to perfection over the years.

In this sparse, beautiful and Kleenex-requiring segment, the lanky libertarian Brit waves goodbye to all we love about cars, exemplified by this vaguely insane Aston, a front-engined all-vented portmanteau of their smallest body and their biggest engine. The ultimate expression of the car as—to paraphrase LJK Setright—the Liberator, freeing us from darkness, ignorance and impotence.

Speculation is already rife about Clarkson’s goodbye also extending not only to the super car but also to Top Gear itself. We’ll see about that in the fall, or whenever he gets his next contract sign, won't we? In the meantime, click play then go listen to something with a V12 engine.

Say what you will about the preposterousness of the Pagani Zonda, the man who builds them has certainly got his material science nailed. The foundation Horacio Pagani has built his eponymous company on is comparable in solidity only to the material he creates his Zondas from: carbon fiber.

For Pagani did not set out at a foolish young age to make his as-close-to-kindergarten-art-as-possible supercars. He paid his dues at Lamborghini, working his way up in the organization until he designed the very Zonda-like 25th Anniversary Countach. Lesser men would then jump headfirst into car construction, but not Pagani: he followed by founding the carbon fiber consultancy Modena Design. By the time he finally got around to building the first Zonda in 1999—the C12—he had been working non-stop with carbon fiber since the first days it cropped up in car design. Allowing the Zonda to become the nimblest yet most rigid supercar of its day.

The last version of the Zonda is the R and its street legal offshoot, the Cinque. On a recent episode of Top Gear, the Cinque was featured in connection with the material it is made out of: an amalgam of carbon fiber and titanium. As quoted from a press release by Richard Hammond, the material is called carbotanium by the Pagani people—only for James May to retort that an equally obvious linguistic move could have resulted in titbon.

The timestamp on this blogpost shall also serve as an anchor for a countdown to the inevitable day when a pair of Oakley sunglasses will be manufactured from the same material. The name itself is so Oakley it hurts. And they certainly don’t shy away from working with titanium.

The artwork above is Natalie Polgar’s “The Incompatibility of Zondas with the Subantarctic Environment,” from The Pagani Zonda Field Guide.

Here's Clarkson's review and, just as importantly, the power laps of both cars. We know one of our mothers will be very disappointed.

As part of his BBC series James May's Toy Stories, he plans to build a two-story house in the middle of the Denbies Wine Estate, in Dorking. Yes, Dorking. Please people, ignore the stick with us here.

More than three million Lego bricks have been delivered to the site.

May will host a building day next Saturday, when members of the public can help him with the project. Now this we'll just have to see. (Hat tip to Jack!) [via BBC News]

...Cunt.

According to various witnesses and The Guardian newspaper, Jeremy Clarkson called Gordon Brown a "cunt" in an unaired/unairable segment of the popular British motoring show. Last time he was forced to apologize because Gordon Brown only has one eye, causing a stir with disability groups.

Either way, the show is immensely popular and Clarkson seems to thrive on this stuff so we don't expect a lot of fallout. Also, we're not sure what argument special interest groups are going to make against him for this quip unless Gordon Brown actually has both sets of reproductive organs. [The Guardian]

Belfast has just completed construction on a new sewer system, meaning Clarkson, the Hamster and May won't have to splash through human waste in the name of infotainment. While the original 1969 film was set in Turin, Michael Cain was actually driving through Coventry's waste disposal system.

Filming is expected to take place "in the coming weeks" meaning we should see the race this season. No word on which one of the trio had the great idea. [via BBC]

That's right, our story on Philip Odegard's little faux speeding escapade made it on to last night's what we read on the blogs news segment of the world's greatest motoring show, Top Gear. And they did about the same amount of fact-checking we did on it. Actually, we think we may have done a bit more. We at least tweeted about it to Philip Odegard — however, it was to no avail as he didn't answer.

But, here's what the OCRegister has to say about the story after doing a bit of digging around:

"The question was raised earlier this week by Jalopnik.com, a site for car lovers, after this image of a speeding ticket was reportedly posted on the Web by someone named Philip Robert Odegard.

The partially obscured image purports to show that Odegard, 22, a self-described technology evangelist and entrepreneur, was caught driving a $1.4 million Bugatti at "210+" mph in the early hours of July 1.

But a call to the California Highway Patrol reveals the image is a fake.

In fact, Odegard was ticketed on April 1 for traveling 100 mph at the same location on the toll road, according to CHP officer Chris Goodwin.

Odegard was driving a 2004 Infiniti, not a 2008 Bugatti, Goodwin said."

What? A 2004 Infiniti? Really? You know, we should have known better. Those silly, self-described social media experts — you never can trust them, can you? But, when even Top Gear gets played, we don't feel like we're in the worst company.

Kudos to the OC Register for, you know, doing the journalist thing and calling up the CHPs to ask. That's our Top Gear "top tip" of the day today! (Hat tip to Sean!) [OC Register]

British bulldog is a tag-based game, of which Red Rover is a descendant, played mainly in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and other Commonwealth countries by children at school. The game is characterised by its physicality often being regarded as violence leading it to be banned from many schools, although this trend is now being reversed.

Despite Jeremy's belief they'd only have a bunch of cruddy Land Rovers ready to "fall over around the corners", the UK Army came equipped with an HMT (High Mobility Truck) 400 high-mobility 4×4 design built under license from Lockheed Martin (versus the other way around according to Clarkson's flapping gums). This Halo Warthog-like vehicle, nicknamed the "Jackal," has a 5.9-liter diesel engine that'll let it do "90 MPH...everywhere."

The British Army also brought:

• A Mastiff 2 heavily-armored, 6x6 wheel-drive patrol vehicle. The Mastiff 2 has a maximum speed of 55 MPH, but it's armed with the latest weapon systems, including a 7.62 mm general purpose machine gun, 12.7 mm heavy machine gun or 40 mm automatic grenade launcher.

• A Fiat-sourced Iveco F1C CRD-engined Panther Command and Liaison Vehicle (CLV).

• Last but not least, a Trojan armored engineering vehicle with all the standard equipment including a dozer blade, mineplough and excavator arm. A Full-Width Mine Plough can be mounted at the front to clear mines and a marking system can also be fitted — both were for this exercise in mad hoonage.

The excavator arm's our favorite part. Ha! Look at the silly little British k-nigggg-it yelling "Run Away!"

Part I

Part II

[Info, Photos via Army.mod.uk, Wikipedia]

Note: No Clarksons were harmed in the filming of this hoonage.