The faithful Liana was replaced for the eighth series by a Chevrolet Lacetti, again retailing at around the £10,000 mark. With the lap time leaderboard now wiped clear and due to the intense competition this part of the show now attracted, the rules for celeb times were tightened, with only five practice laps allowed before a final timed lap was taken. The slowest-ever lap in this model was by Jimmy Carr, who had previously held second place in the Liana behind Ellen MacArthur, but in the Chevrolet he span off and crawled in at a snail-like 2 minutes 8.91 seconds. Billie Piper’s lap was deemed ‘incomplete’ by The Stig, who said she had not completed all the corners: after Clarkson asked the Top Gear audience, however, they allowed her time to stand.
Then, at the start of Series 15, the Lacetti was replaced by a Kia cee’d (usually referred to by Clarkson as the ‘Cee Apostrophe D’). Rather than simply explain that they had replaced the previous car, in true Top Gear fashion the team parked the Chevrolet Lacetti under a pair of 550-feet chimneys at a Northfleet cement works and blew up the monstrous columns while the entire carnage was filmed.
Contrary to the generalisation that is ‘The Thespian Zone’, the fastest star to date across all three Reasonably Priced Cars is the mega-moviestar Tom Cruise, who appeared in Series 15, Episode 5 during the summer of 2010. He lapped the circuit in the Cee Apostrophe D in 1.44.2, pipping his fellow guest – and co-star in the movie Knight And Day – Cameron Diaz by one second. Following Cruise’s blistering success, there were many internet rumours saying the time had been fixed so as to pander to the Hollywood heartthrob’s profile, an accusation strongly denied by the Top Gear producers. There is no evidence to suggest this: indeed, the lap was witnessed by many outside of the core backroom staff plus there are numerous stopwatches, cameras all synched up and even staff on certain parts of the track to ensure no one cuts a corner.
Andy Wilman pointed out that Cruise had turned up early and put more time into his practice than any previous guest; he went on to say that it saddened him that people might try and take the shine off such a fun moment before vehemently refuting any accusations of fixing. It is also worth bearing in mind that Cruise has a fleet of beautiful fast cars and is known to do many of his own stunts; on the day of the lap, he even took out a Bugatti Veyron and reached 190mph on the test track so this was clearly not your everyday celebrity tottering around a lap.
When Formula 1 stars come on the show to do a lap in the Reasonably Priced Car, they are given their own leaderboard, the assumption being it is unfair to list them next to celebrities and other non-professional racing drivers. Some observers have commented that the F1 drivers’ times are not much faster than the various famous faces topping the ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ leaderboard, but don’t be fooled. Neuroscientist Dr Kerry Spackman has worked in Formula 1 for years and explained to the author that this apparently small margin was very misleading: ‘When Damon Hill and all these Formula 1 guys go round, it isn’t that much quicker than the top [celebrity guests]. A normal car is just so jolly easy to drive; it’s so forgiving even when it catches you by surprise. If the Reasonably Priced Car starts to slide out of control, a Formula 1 driver will have enough time to yawn, make a cup of tea and think, “Oh yeah, about now I’ll give it a bit of a correction.” But that’s also why there’s no real difference between a Formula 1 driver and the top guys in a Reasonably Priced Car because the car is so benign, so simple and so easy, there’s not much you can really do [to be substantially faster]. Obviously Top Gear has had a number of celebrities turn up – there are a lot of petrol-heads out there, after all – and they all think they are pretty good but in actual fact, they have no concept, none whatsoever [of the skills of a racing driver].’
Spackman adeptly sums up the appeal of the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment: ‘Jackie Stewart once said, “There’s only two things you can’t criticise a man for, one is his prowess in bed and the other is his driving.” So many people I’ve come across fancy themselves as being pretty good at driving but even a very good driver like a saloon or touring car champion isn’t up there with F1 drivers. The analogy I would use is that no one would ever say, “You know what? I think I’d take Nadal on in a game of tennis, I think I’d give him a good run for his money.” If you’ve ever sat in a race car with a Formula 1 driver when he’s driving in anger (I’ve sat in a car with a number of drivers), it’s incredible. Yet every man fancies themselves as a bit of a good driver.’
The Top Gear test track was custom-designed for the show by engineers from Lotus. It is located at Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, which was built in 1942 by the 2nd Battalion Royal Canadian Engineers and constantly used during the Second World War (thereafter it fell into disuse and like many British airfields, was turned into a race track). The track has been cleverly designed to include corners that punish oversteer, others that expose understeer; there are bumps and adverse cambers in difficult places, as well as straights demanding full-throttle power that would frighten anyone but the less-than-lunatic. When Richard Hammond first introduced the track in Episode 1 and talked the viewer through the corners, he claimed this was such a cunning leveller of a car’s foibles that it made 0–60 and top speed times ‘meaningless’. However, the 1.75 miles of circuit has played host to a party of the greatest supercars ever built and to date, the top of the leaderboard suggests power still rules the day. That said, when the fastest production car ever built – the Bugatti Veyron – first went round, it came only fourth, with Clarkson citing its excessive weight as the problem.
Some of the corners were already in situ, but others – such as Chicago and Hammerhead – have literally been painted onto the track to add extra challenges. According to Top Gear, they are repeatedly asked to host track days for fans and one can imagine the demand would be huge, but alas the track is essentially a figure-of-eight and so carnage would at some point prevail.
The track itself is a graveyard for failed celebrity laps but also an automotive Hollywood Walk of Fame, with several corners and names for parts of the track honouring former contestants and incidents. So we have ‘Crooner Corner’ named after The Stig’s famed penchant for easy listening music. Then it’s on to Willson, so-called for former Top Gear presenter Quentin Willson, the first part of the track where inferior cars start to struggle. Chicago is named not after the Mid-Western city in the USA but for the MOR band that’s another Stig favourite; likewise Bacharach, as in Burt. Former producer and Top Gear legend Jon Bentley is celebrated with the infamous tyre wall, whose camera shakes if a car travels through fast enough. This is situated at the end of ‘The Follow-Through’, in itself the most extreme test of a driver’s nerve on the track, with even supercars sometimes having to lift slightly to avoid oblivion. But perhaps most famous of all is Gambon – originally dubbed Carpenters after the classic genteel brother/sister duo from the 1970s. Oh, and Hammerhead is so-named because it’s shaped like a hammerhead!
Of course, The Stig is the master around this track, but even he is sometimes beaten by the mental power of certain howling supercars. Most famously was a crash in the Koenigsegg, The Stig’s biggest mash-up (of more later). There’s a rumour that in late-2010, a computer console version of the Top Gear test track will be made available within the Gran Turismo game.
One other prominent feature of the new Top Gear format was the so-called ‘Cool Wall’. This was one of many features introduced with the new format to get around a very pragmatic problem: it’s so much more demanding to film a car review show in the post-Millennial era because modern cars are so good. The dark days of British Leyland that Clarkson has so controversially rebuked over the years are long gone, unionists no longer control the factories and as a rule, most cars coming onto the market have had billions of pounds in development spent on them. Very few modern cars go badly wrong; some even offer ‘lifetime warranties’, so confident are their manufacturers of the quality; others bought on the high street for relatively modest amounts are quicker than the rally cars of the 1970s.
So to some extent, Top Gear are frequently faced with the tricky problem that when a new car comes along to the marketplace, it is very well built, thoughtfully finished and altogether a soundly designed piece of engineering. This is a problem that the show’s producer Andy Wilman directly alluded