The Top Gear Story by Martin Roach Page A

like a tugboat; May’s vessel was the Triumph, being almost exactly the same as before with a few minor additions that he explained, but no one else really understood.
    It was clear that the production team knew this was a much more difficult challenge as all three presenters were now wearing life-vests. Indeed, Clarkson’s pride came before a fall as they drove into the channel only to find the high winds and choppy waves too much within a matter of minutes. Clarkson and Hammond seemed genuinely frightened while May failed abysmally to even leave the harbour side. Day One of the shoot was eventually aborted and they decided to return the nextmorning when better, calmer weather was predicted. Hammond fared well initially but ultimately his car-boat sank; he and May were left drinking tea from a flask in the sea before clambering aboard Clarkson’s admirably buoyant and working vessel.
    With typical Top Gear gusto, they then announced that they were about to smash Richard Branson’s one hour and forty minutes record for crossing the channel in an amphibious car, which of course they came nowhere near. However, after dodging mountainous ferries and tankers, they did eventually sight land and although they’d missed Calais, somehow they managed to scramble the odd car-boat onto dry land, much to the total bemusement of several hundred sunbathing French holiday-makers . They had landed in Sangatte, the highly controversial French town mostly famed in Britain for the illegal immigrants who used to stream across to the UK from this port. One is left to imagine how Jeremy Clarkson and his famously acid tongue explained to the watching Frenchmen what they were doing.
    In the Top Gear studio perched on a sloping pedestal sits another battered old Toyota Hilux, the star of one of the show’s most popular challenges ever: is the Toyota pick-up truck really indestructible? It was way back in Series 3, Episode 5 when the team first screened an Australian advert for the truck and pointed out that all the anti-American militia around the world seem to be filmed on BBC News driving those faithful old pick-ups, packed full of machine guns. So, in an attempt to find out just how strong the Toyota was, the trio bought a 13-year-old Hilux 2.4 litre Diesel for £1,000, with over 190,000 miles on the clock.
    The team then put together a series of what can only be termed multiple attempts at grievous bodily harm on the unsuspecting truck. So we see them driving it down steep stony stairs, scraping it along walls, crashing into a (soon-to- be-notorious ) chestnut tree, leaving it standing in the SevernEstuary as the tide came in, dropping it from a crane, driving it through a wooden shed (the Top Gear production office, apparently), dropping a caravan onto its roof, smashing a demolition crane’s wrecking ball into its rear and even setting fire to it. Amazingly, after all the abuse, it still worked!
    The feature actually over-ran the episode because the truck refused to be killed. So, in the sixth part of the series, we witnessed the finale: they put the pick-up on top of a tower block, which was then demolished (how did it get there?) with Andy Wilman’s ‘£100,000 just for crisps’ budget. After the rubble and dust had settled, a mechanic came on site and without spare parts and only the aid of basic tools, he spent a brief few minutes under the bonnet. He reconnected the battery, put some diesel in it… Yes, it still worked! Clarkson called it ‘automotive greatness’.
    Aside from the brilliant television feature, it doesn’t take a genius to work out the commercial effect of 350 million viewers around the world seeing this remarkable machine treated to such abuse only for it still to work. All hail the Toyota Hilux, one of Top Gear ’s greatest-ever features!
    Â 
    Perhaps one of the series’ most famous and brilliantly executed challenges was when the team decided to turn a