On Top Gear 9/12, the lads (with the Stig) enter a diesel BMW in a 24 hour endurance race at Silverstone. They blow up the motor during qualifying, ruin the fuel pump with 4 hours to go, blow the injectors, Hammond takes out a £500000 supercar…
and they finish.
But the best bit -
putting Penis and Arse Biscuit on the car doors, hidden in the fake sponsership logos :smack:
They really are adolescents in grownup bodies.
And I love it.
Si
They have come to America a few times. Have they ever done a demolition derby? It seems right up their alley.
James May saying ‘cock’ never stops being funny.
Just in the last week or so they had one with motor homes 
Some say he’s a robot from the future…
some say his surname is Schumacher…
we call him the Stig!
Did you see how fast that man was going - he was overtaking loads of cars?!
They also tried to to destroy a Toyota pickup truck, once. Rammed it into walls, ran it through buildings, dropped a trailer on it, hit it with a wrecking ball, set it on fire, dropped it from a crane, let the tides carry it out to sea, and put it on the roof of a 40-story building, which was then demolished by explosives.
They failed. At the end of all that, it still ran.
No need to go to America for one of them, it’s the standard end for a series of banger races here.
A Youtube search for “Top Gear: Killing a Toyota” will yield results for this. An incredible machine! When it is driven into the studio at the end all battered and burnt to fuck it’s actually quite moving. IIRC they have it hanging around on the studio set to this day.
I am consistently shocked that anyone will lend them rare sports cars and prototypes given the sheer quantity of disasters that happen to them.
The only thing that has been ridiculous was the rocket car that Hammond managed to groove a trench in the ground with his head. Car journos get hot cars all the time, and mostly they can handle them on a track, or probably most places. Aston Martin gave the last James Bond film half a dozen DBwhatevers and they were all trashed getting the big roll stunt right.
I do often wonder what their budget is.
Clarkson managed it though the next time he took one out, when they made amphibious cars he rolled his in a lake and it refused to start back in the studio.
They make the cars look damned good, the standards of camera work and effects get higher with each series, its good advertising for the makers.
And which rare sports cars or prototypes had a “sheer disaster” occur to them, exactly? Apparently there are several to choose from … I’d love to hear three. And no, Richard Hammond’s accident does not count.
Funny, I read that three were destroyed. Three stunt cars, that is … which are not production DBS models. Keeping in mind the cars used for stunts of that variety are rarely the same cars used for the rest of the shots. They are purpose-built to crash, often to come apart a certain way to make the damage look more dramatic. There are multiple copies of one-offs or customs because one may get used for interior detail shots, another may be used for heavy braking, another two or three may be used for crashing, etc. And they do it all on a budget. The Tumbler in Batman Begins was the same way. I saw the actual vehicle during filming of The Dark Knight in Chicago while I was doing electrical contract work for a hotel with a cargo loading dock on Lower Wacker Drive along the Chicago River where all the vehicular chase location shooting was taking place. They kept the “interior detail shot” Tumbler models under wraps. The interior of the functional driving models was as spartan as could be: no fancy lights or electronics, just a Toyota truck frame with a steering wheel and exposed mechanicals, and they had at least one other identical version of it. Basically, fancy go-carts. Point is, it’s not like they go flipping and crashing pristine, rare cars with richly stitched leather, sophisticated electronics, handbuilt engines and expensive drivetrains into the air to watch them smash into thousands of pieces. They take out all the fancy stuff and throw in a cheap V8 drivetrain, then add foley effects back in during post to make it sound dramatic. That Aston flipping around in the air is probably closer to $25,000 than $250,000. They did the same thing with the Vanquish in Die Another Day. Again, just like on Top Gear, they’re crashing cheapo beaters, not expensive exotics, and the fact that there are people going around thinking that TV and film producers are stupid enough to crash cars costing hundreds of thousands of dollars is pretty amusing, in a pathetic kind of way.
Really? How many of them clock over 300mph?
In just the handful of episodes that have aired in the US I’ve seen the Stig cracked up a sports car that cost nearly a million pounds and they accidentally drove a tractor into a prototype alternative energy car. I’ve read of other accidents with high end sports cars but haven’t had a chance to see them.
I dunno. The stunt man’s blog seems to imply that it wasn’t a cheapo beater they used, given the problems they had actually getting the thing to roll in the first place due to it’s inherent stability. But granted, yes, they probably didn’t have the hand-stitched leather and the fancy CD player installed. And anyway, it’s Ford who are paying for the cars, not the film company.
Most of the disasters the Top Gear team manage to create are deliberate, and sometimes even carefully planned to look worse than they are. Not all, though - I’m sure this endurance race was legitimate.
Some say, his face is digital. . .
Some say, when he slows down, brake lights come on in his buttocks. . .
I loved Hammond showing himself up in increasingly fast race cars last week. Ending up in the 1000hp Renault F1, and at full throttle. . .
for 0.2 seconds.
I have a car mag lying somewhere about my parents with an article on the DBS and no, there was no fancy interior at all but I just can’t remember how much else of the real thing was used other than the exterior.
The bit I liked best was when they got a German lady racing driver, who knew the Nurburgring racing circuit really well, to drive a van around it.
She was overtaking motorcycles!