Top 10 Greatest Top Gear Moments of All Time

Top 10 Greatest Top Gear Moments of All Time

Welcome to WatchMojoUK, and today we’re counting down our picks for the absolute best moments on “Top Gear”.

<h4>#10: 3AM Driving Challenge</h4>

For this challenge, they wanted to know what it would be like to travel back in time and have to get home in the small hours without waking up their parents – just like every 17-year-old with a driving license has to do at some point. Hammond’s victorious early on, pushing his car up the drive and barely making a sound. But things collapse when it gets to Clarkson’s turn. First, the car is so heavy he struggles to move it, and then it won’t STOP moving and crashes into an outbuilding. Remarkably, though, he didn’t lose, because he and Hammond had the remote for May’s stereo and switched it on when he got near.

<h4>#9: Peugeot Meeting</h4>

This very historically accurate re-enactment was devised to get to the bottom of why Peugeot, which used to make record-breaking rally cars, decided to stop making good cars and make rubbish cars instead. On a poorly made set with wine, turtlenecks, a plate of raw onions and drawn-on moustaches, the group gets to work. It’s Clarkson who suggests they should start making truly awful cars that don’t function in any way, an abandonment of the company’s previous commitment to good engineering in favour of higher profit margins. If there’s one thing the Brits can’t get enough of, it’s mocking the French.

<h4>#8: Amphibious Cars</h4>

Generally, you shouldn’t be combining cars with water, unless you’re an excellent engineer and REALLY know what you’re doing. None of the blokes on “Top Gear” are that, though, which is what made this amphibious car challenge so entertaining. Immediately, May in his sail-car gets stuck in the weeds. Jeremy goes next in the Toyota and it’s clear that the enormous engine he’s attached to the thing is making it sink at the back and take on water. And Hammond’s campervan breaks right away, sinking in a matter of minutes. The Toyota sinks at the last second and Captain Slow would have won, had his clutch not broken.

<h4>#7: Quaint My Ride</h4>

Jeremy wants a car that looks exactly like his house, complete with period features, flagstones, and a wood-burning stove, all installed in a Mercedes. He teams up with a French designer to make this possible, and absolutely enrages the poor woman with his absurd brief. The finished car is given to Hammond and May to test drive, and its myriad issues become clear. Putting a wood stove in an enclosed space full of petrol was bad enough, but worse, the cement floor has damaged the wire connecting the brake lights, so they don’t work at all. May quite rightly points out that the car would have failed its MOT and wouldn’t be road-legal.

<h4>#6: Smallest Car in the World</h4>

This absurdly small car, the Peel P50, was produced in the 1960s as a “microcar” that was, and still is, road-legal, by some miracle. Clarkson climbs inside and takes the car on his daily commute through central London, crowds gathering at the roadside wherever he goes. He was able to drive all the way through the bollards and right up to the front doors of the BBC to show it off to “Top Gear’s” production team. It’s right at home in the Beeb office, small enough to go through the corridors, around the desks, and into the lifts, where we get a small cameo from Fiona Bruce. How much would a P50 be valued on “Antiques Roadshow”?

<h4>#5: The Campervan Challenge</h4>

The mortal enemy of “Top Gear” is, and always has been, the campervan. Campervans and caravans are the bane of every motorist’s life, clogging up the lanes with their slow pace. Clarkson’s converted a Citroen into a multi-storey tower, while Hammond needs to disassemble and then re-assemble his cottage on the campsite. It’s astonishing that Clarkson’s block of flats wasn’t the worst thing the contest produced, as Hammond’s mansion becomes a freezing-cold wind tunnel by the time they turn in for the night. But at least Hammond’s structure didn’t get pushed off a cliff by the end.

<h4>#4: Run Out of Alabama</h4>

While in one of the deepest corners of the Deep South, the gang needs to graffiti each other’s cars with inflammatory slogans designed to draw “maximum attention” in this part of the US. The cars endorse the Democrats, bash country music, and advocate for gay rights, all things that might get them in trouble in this gun-happy corner of the Bible Belt. And what do you know, they do earn the ire of the locals, getting themselves attacked at a petrol station. When May’s car breaks down and Hammond needs to jumpstart it, it looks like they might actually get shot. They get aggressively chased all the way across state lines and hastily scrub the cars clean.

<h4>#3: Destroying the Toyota Hilux</h4>

Was this Toyota Hilux really “indestructible”, as all the marketing claimed? Well, would you believe that yes, it was, even after it had come into contact with Jeremy Clarkson. They put the Hilux through everything, starting off small with a long flight of stairs and eventually subjecting it to a wrecking ball and letting it get swept away into the Bristol Channel. In classic “Top Gear” fashion, they drop a caravan onto it from a great height, and that won’t defeat it, either. However, it WAS the Toyota Hilux that Clarkson decided to use for his amphibious car, and it didn’t come back from that. So, maybe Toyota DOES need to update its copy.

<h4>#2: The Stig Unmasked</h4>

After the Stig was ruthlessly killed off when the tabloids revealed his identity as Perry McCarthy, we got a new professional driver to take on the mantle. We now know that this was Ben Collins, though he, too, has now been replaced. But once, the Stig was unmasked to be none other than champion F1 driver Michael Schumacher. But could Schumacher, an A-lister in the world of racing, really have been moonlighting as the Stig for years? Well, no, the whole thing was a big fake-out. Then again, following Collins’ departure, the current – and perhaps final – Stig, is still an enigma. Maybe it really IS Schumacher underneath the iconic, white helmet?

<h4>#1: Reliant Robin Space Shuttle</h4>

Isn’t it strange that you can send a Reliant Robin into space, but it still can’t reverse? This was all Hammond’s idea, wanting to build a recoverable space shuttle on the BBC’s budget – something that almost certainly should NOT be possible. But, as Hammond points out, the Reliant IS the right shape, so it SHOULD work. So, was it a success? Well, the rocket worked, which is something, but it ended up nose-diving into a field and exploding; there’s no recovery from that. But we’ll always know that, years before Elon Musk launched a Tesla Roadster into the solar system, “Top Gear” had its own, indelibly British space launch.

Let us know in the comments what YOUR favourite “Top Gear” challenge was.