There are road tests of cars and then there are road tests of Bristol cars. The latter are without exception exercises in pleading, begging and the abuse of op-ed columns with the single, inevitable conclusion of no press car. Bristol owner Tony Crook likes to keep it that way, which is perhaps understandable when you consider that the few people who do manage to gain fleeting access to Bristols via owners willing to face Crook’s subsequent wrath usually find that the cars are puzzling examples of shoddy construction sold for Lamborghini prices.

So it came as quite a shock to my friend Zsolt Csikós—road test editor of Hungarian car site Totalcar—that a call to Bristol’s headquarters resulted in Tony Crook himself on the line and the promise of a ride. This lovable geek who often shares Eeyore’s outlook on life managed what even Jeremy Clarkson couldn’t manage: he found himself behind the wheel of a brand-new Bristol. A Bristol Fighter at that, powered by America’s great offering at the altars of displacement: the Viper engine.

Although Bristol Cars is a post-WW2 spinoff of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, they eschew an important engineering principle which crossed over from the world of aviation to car construction: Bristol cars are neither unibodies nor monocoques but bodies over frames, like pickup trucks. It is perhaps fitting then that the Fighter’s V10 engine was originally a Chrysler truck engine. In the Fighter, the all-aluminum block is equipped with Bristol’s own cylinder head and exhaust system, good for 558 HP. Should the latter be found inadequate, turbochargers are available to boost output to beyond a thousand horsepower, coupled with similar amounts of torque.

Of course this being Bristol, the test drive was not a week of freeform excursion on B-roads but a leisurely crawl through London traffic. I shall defer to the author at this point, translated from the Hungarian:

What does it feel like? I gave the throttle no more than a percent of go, save for my rare instances of hoonage when I gave it two percent. It doesn’t really make a difference as 558 HP is so much power that a heartier sneeze will drop you across half of Europe. Why would anyone possibly need the 1026 HP of the turbocharged version? One cannot think of anything other than the potential for great pub tales.

The clutch is remarkably light, not Diablo-heavy at all, and the same is true of the steering. Even though the Fighter could certainly use more upper-class destinations, it is perfectly drivable on the side streets around Soho. The gearshift is American in feel, precision not its strongest asset, but it requires a steady and firm grip for operation. And even if I never exceeded 40 MPH in the Fighter, it was a wonderful experience. The interior, the engine with its endless reserves of power, the execution and the sea of dials combine to make even a crawling Bristol a memorable driving experience.

Bristol is a beautiful, rugged, romantic theory on four wheels. The same goes for the Fighter, with more power and a more professional feel. Take it as it is. If you can.

So there you have it. If you’re no fan of computer displays and like your cars with copious amounts of tech-ed spirit and the charms and personality of handmade construction, your new ride is ready. All you need now is upwards of $370,000—and catching Tony Crook in a good mood. Just make sure you don’t namedrop Jeremy Clarkson.

Photo Credit: Zsolt Csikós/Totalcar

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]

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.

...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]

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.

My last visit to the United States of America was in the early spring of 2004. I landed at JFK in a freezing wind, clattered in raw metal subway cars up to St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and proceeded to spend the next few weeks getting hooked on Krispy Kreme donuts, Macintosh computers and a Cadillac Seville with no ass.

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The apartment was on the first floor of an old house by St. Nicholas Park, bathed in regular clouds of marijuana smoke wafting up from the street below, visited by the occasional cockroach and heated by a silver-painted contraption seemingly from the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

They say it was a radiator. Perhaps, but it was certainly an awful radiator. You couldn’t trust it at all. During the cold winter of 2003-2004, it let down the apartment’s two permanent inhabitants—Bertalan pictured above, Lili behind the camera—so many times that it became a sad running joke. There were reports of entire days spent shivering in winter clothes and under blankets. Watching exhaled air form clouds as the ambient temperature approached the bottom edge of water in the liquid state.

But all that was forgotten when the radiator came to life. It snorted and hawked and gurgled and hissed, it was a machine from Victorian England living a second lease on life. You never felt safe in its immediate vicinity as a violent steam explosion with shrapnels of red-hot metal flying through the air often seemed imminent. And it gave off ample heat. It dried towels, warmed up St. Nicholas Avenue, it lifted the spirits.

The Bugatti Veyron sounds exactly like that radiator. That, of course, is no great surprise, as Jeremy Clarkson has already described the car in very similar terms in his December 2005 review for The Sunday Times, writing that “the engine sounds like Victorian plumbing — it looks like Victorian plumbing as well, to be honest.”

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The Veyron is at 03:07

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But it’s one thing to read that in the paper and quite another to stand three and a half years later behind bales of hay in the south of England and hear this modern-day Turbopanzer for the first time. You get used to supercars screaming on the upper edge of the human hearing spectrum and nothing really prepares you for the ultimate of their breed—at least in numbers—to gurgle by as a Victorian battleship, barely exercising the depths of its quirky 8-liter W16 engine. Sounding not like a car at all.

I wonder what Ettore Bugatti would make of this. That the latest incarnation of his lithe French racers is built by Germans to sound like the war machines of the British Empire.

Incidentally, the blue car pictured here is the T-top Veyron, also known as Officially The Fastest Road Legal Production Convertible. It was among the few cars cordoned off from the swirling masses at the Festival of Speed. You could, of course, lean in and poke its polished aluminum wheels, if you had long enough fingers.

I had long enough fingers but restrained myself. But I did lean in to bring you this picture of the Stig's head, which apparently comes on the side of your $2,000,000 purchase:

Photo of apartment with radiator by Lili Mesterhazy.

Jay's in England to visit the Goodwood Festival of Speed and flirt with Elle MacPherson, but it looks like he also managed to swing past the production studio of a television show with many, many more viewers than his own. At least now we know Leno's not The Stig, they never would have packed all that chin into that full-face Simpson helmet anyways. [via Jay's Garage]

Despite being the first to tell you that Stig would lift his helmet during last night's episode and it would be none other than Michael Schumacher underneath, we're now going to provide three reminders to everyone that no, the blonde-haired track-meister's not the only Stig.

First, one look at Shumacher's record-setting time around the Top Gear test track in a Ferrari FXX, and you realize he's not the same Stiggie we've seen on the show the last two seasons. Schumi was more balls-to-the-wall around the corners than the previous incarnation of our beloved Stiggie.

Secondly, Ferrari's only going to let an owner drive the Ferrari FXX. Make sense to us then that since they were testing Schumi's FXX, they'd have Schumi be the Stig.

That makes sense given the truth is, as most know, there have been many drivers who've played the Stig. From the original black-nomex racing suit-encased Stig played by Perry McCarthy, former Formula One racer and test driver for the Benetton, Arrows and Williams teams — to "Big Stig" who we're pretty sure was played by Tony Stewart after ingesting a small cow, there is a different Stig for different needs. And we're pretty sure African Stig was not at all Lewis Hamilton. Basically, we've been told by the BBC there's been no less than eight drivers donning the white nomex.

The most high-profile is Heikki Kovalainen, the 27-year-old Finnish Formula One McLaren driver who is Lewis Hamilton's partner. Forty-one-year-old former GT world championship racing driver Chris Goodwin, from London, has also starred as the Stig. As has fellow Londoner Julian Bailey, a 47-year-old former Formula One racing driver who raced for the Tyrell and Lotus teams.

Stunt driver Terry Grant from Bushey in Hertfordshire has also slipped into the white racing leathers to become the Stig. Stunt driver Russ Swift is another who has become the Stig. Then of course there were those Ben Collins rumors.

Finally, Dan Lang, a Swedish snow mobile racing champion played the Stig in a Top Gear stunt where he jumped a snow mobile off a ski jump. So to every Stig there is a purpose and yesterday's Ferrari FXX season belonged to Schumacher. Who will be the next to turn, turn, turn in the white racing duds? We guess we'll have to tune in to find out. Which is really what the BBC wants.

And that brings us to the third reminder. See, this was totally a tongue-in-cheek PR play. And it worked. We went all ga-ga over the Schumi as Stig story and you know what, so did all of you. And that's cool, because frankly, it was entertaining as hell. And when it comes down to it, we don't watch Top Gear to be informed, we watch Top Gear to be entertained.

Incidentally, on an almost entirely unrelated note — there's some serious props that need to go out to the Beeb for figuring out the importance of not only having a clip up on YouTube of last night's unmasking (we've included it again here), but for having it up within moments of the show's completion. Good work by Her Royal Majesty's TV service for understanding there's people outside of the BBC's broadcast network interested in seeing this momentous occasion — and beating out the thousands who'd be dropping pirated clips up and online. Already the clip's got thousands of comments and tens of thousands of views. Bravo, BBC.

According to Top Gear's own blog, Clarkson boasts tomorrow night's episode is "going to be the best thing that's ever been on television ever." Clarkson then reportedly paused for a brief moment before completing his sentence with "...in the world." Clarkson goes on to say

"the Stig barges into the studio and in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, removes his helmet...as a television moment, it's up there with Neil Armstrong walking on… the corpse of JR Ewing."

While Clarkson goes no further in providing details to the identity of the show's tame race driver, it's more evidence we'll see the Italian Stallion-driving German underneath Stig's white helmet when we eventually see the show pour down upon us like a torrent of rain.

Additionally, Top Gear's site's spilled the beans on a few more details from tomorrow night's show in an exclusive photo gallery — including a first drive of the Lotus Evora and a train vs. bike vs. Jaguak XK120 race. We can't wait for tomorrow night — be here with us as we'll have first-hand reports as soon as the show finishes airing — as well as, perhaps, some super-secret video. We already know it's going to be simply magical.

Photo Credit: Hannah Johnston / Getty Images Entertainment

MAJOR NEW EXHIBITION LAUNCHED AT THE BEAULIEU ATTRACTIONWorld of Top Gear Now Open

The World of Top Gear Exhibition opened its doors at the National Motor Museum on June 19th.

The new exhibition at Beaulieu in the New Forest features a collection of the actual cars created by presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May for some of their most ambitious challenges on the TV show over the years.

Fans of the show will be familiar with challenges such as their attempt to cross the Channel with their home-made car/boats, and the Stretched Limo Challenge, where they set out to turn rusty second-hand cars into luxury stretch limos, and chauffeur three celebs to the BRIT Awards.

Visitors will also experience the Top Gear ‘Enormodrome' which aims to recreate the feel of the Top Gear studio, where the TV show is filmed in front of a live audience.

As well as regular features from the programme including the Cool Wall and the Celebrity ‘Lap Times' boards, visitors can watch an exclusive video presentation from behind the scenes at the TG HQ with Jeremy, Richard and James plus clips from the show featuring the cars on display.

"It makes perfect sense for the National Motor Museum to be working with BBC Worldwide on the launch of World of Top Gear. While the National Motor Museum is primarily about historic vehicles this exhibition shows that cars can be entertaining and accessible to the whole family, not just the car enthusiast. We are delighted with the response that it has received from Top Gear fans," said Stephen Munn, Commercial Director at the National Motor Museum.

"It's fantastic that Beaulieu are preserving for posterity so many of the cars Jeremy, Richard and James have built for the show, and we are delighted to make the cars accessible for Top Gear fans to enjoy close up," said Adam Waddell, Managing Director of Top Gear, BBC Worldwide.

Note to Editors

* World of Top Gear can be viewed as part of a visit to the whole Beaulieu attraction including the National Motor Museum with its collection of over 250 vehicles, Palace House, home of the Montagu family since 1538 and the 13th century Beaulieu Abbey, plus rides, and drives for all the family. Open every day, except Christmas Day, from 10am. For more information Tel: 01590 612345 or visit www.beaulieu.co.uk
* BBC Worldwide's announcement follows exhibition success with Doctor Who where over 1.5 million tickets have been sold since 2005 in venues across the UK from Earl's Court, to Glasgow, to the home of production in Cardiff.

If you’ll pardon the pun and the allusion to body snatching, you must have all seen this segment of Top Gear’s Series 12 Episode 6 last May December. So, no news. In fact, we've even posted a part of it already in another Fiesta-related post.

But it does not do this pinnacle of televised motoring journalism justice. It is magnificent on many levels, including on the questions it raises about the very concept of road tests.

The second coming of Top Gear—as opposed to the original series—has never been about road tests per se, which are usually boring, videographed articles smattered with Excel spreadheets. On the contrary, Top Gear is a reflection of Jeremy Clarkson’s weird persona, which—as beautifully summed by my AK-wielding F1-driving friend Nino Karotta—is a decades-long career built on descriptions of what seventeen-year-old boys would like to do with cars.

Unlike seventeen-year-old boys, of course, Clarkson actually does everything a seventeen-year-old boy fantasizes about. With cars, that is. We’re not that intimate.

Still, you’ve got to grow up at some point, haven’t you? Just to prove that growing up does not necessarily mean discarding one’s seventeen-year-old self but can also be accomplished with a layering of older personalities, Clarkson road tests the new Ford Fiesta.

He does so in a way that will make you question the very essence of motoring journalism. Or, as Nino put it: “Azt hiszem, az autósműsor el van készítve. Keressünk másik feladatot.” Which roughly translates to: “Televised motoring journalism is a done deal. Let’s find other projects to occupy ourselves with.”

On a helpful note, Clarkson’s test also proves that no matter your profession, an amphibious task force will always come in handy.

Watch it if you haven’t done so yet. Watch it again if you already have. Then go and do something slightly dangerous.

Photo Credit: Top Gear

[via FinalGear]

Perhaps his greatest move in the genre was when he went medieval on a Corvette in a helicopter equipped with two miniguns. It is also the clip I post here with a significant amount of trepidation, hoping that y’all will not feel compelled to subject your crazy Euro car boy to similar treatment. Do note that I like Corvettes a great deal. Still—it’s hilarious television.

As Season 13 of Top Gear is being filmed, a set of photos have made it to the Lancer Register message board, showing soldiers, a large sand-colored military vehicle, a helicopter, and a white Evo which progresses between pictures from intact to severely damaged. The connection between these elements is not, at the moment, readily apparent.

Until further details emerge, may I suggest Top Gear’s take on a Range Rover vs. a Challenger tank or a Lotus Exige vs. an Apache helicopter gunship?

Photo Credit: Lancer Register