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Authors: Martin Roach
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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’snerve 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 to in a book that he co-wrote with Richard Hammond, What Not to Drive (2006). So, apart from stunts and specials, the stars incars and lengthy features, the show has had to come up with other ways of reviewing cars, the basic staple item on a programme such as this. For the majority of less-glamorous cars, one way of doing this is the so-called ‘Cool Wall’.
Each week, photos of cars are held aloft and discussed/berated by the presenters, with occasional interjections from the studio audience, after which the threesome agree which side of the wall they can go on: ‘Seriously Uncool’, ‘Uncool’, ‘Cool’ and ‘Sub-Zero’. Each presenter has different and highly subjective criteria for classifying a car’s cool factor – for example, Clarkson uses the idea of whether the car would impress his celebrity crush, Kristin Scott Thomas (or more latterly, Fiona Bruce). Other times, he disagrees with Hammond and
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’snerve 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 to in a book that he co-wrote with Richard Hammond, What Not to Drive (2006). So, apart from stunts and specials, the stars incars and lengthy features, the show has had to come up with other ways of reviewing cars, the basic staple item on a programme such as this. For the majority of less-glamorous cars, one way of doing this is the so-called ‘Cool Wall’.
Each week, photos of cars are held aloft and discussed/berated by the presenters, with occasional interjections from the studio audience, after which the threesome agree which side of the wall they can go on: ‘Seriously Uncool’, ‘Uncool’, ‘Cool’ and ‘Sub-Zero’. Each presenter has different and highly subjective criteria for classifying a car’s cool factor – for example, Clarkson uses the idea of whether the car would impress his celebrity crush, Kristin Scott Thomas (or more latterly, Fiona Bruce). Other times, he disagrees with Hammond and
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