I couldn’t even finish this week’s episode. I just couldn’t sit and watch while you all on screen pretended to be having a good time, making a good show.
What hurts me the most is how you present just like Top Gear used to. The McLaren Long Tail film. It had everything a TG film should have. There was shouting. There was tire smoke. There even was some very dramatic footage of the historic F1 Long Tail driving in a straight line and edited so it looked interesting.
But there wasn’t any of the bite of the old show that made it so good to watch, even for an obsessive like me.
This new episode claimed that the 675 Long Tail is as historic and as great as its F1 Long Tail predecessor. Don’t get me wrong, the 675LT is by all accounts a spectacular car, but it’s ultimately a very well modified version of a regular 650S road car. It’s nothing in comparison to the F1 Long Tail, which was the last iteration of the already legendary F1, the last ordinary road-going car to win at the highest level of prototype racing, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The F1 Long Tail is the end of the line of a hundred-year tradition, the postscript to the GT40s and Bugattis and Blower Bentleys of years gone by.
The only reason to say the 675LT is as great is because it’s new. It will only take a few years before McLaren comes out with an even newer, even faster car, and the 675LT will be forgotten.
You see this sort of thing happen all the time in the world of car reviews, where the reviewer tries to catch some of the shine reflecting off the car itself. You end up with a review that sound more like an ad for the car than an analysis. That’s something that was beneath Top Gear in the past (at least, when the old staff wasn’t phoning it in). Now the show just feels cheap.
Halfway through the film of them slowly driving some crossovers around South Africa, I turned the show off. I didn’t want to get hurt anymore. Stop messing with my memories, Top Gear.