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 to in a book that he co-wrote with Richard Hammond, What Not to Drive (2006). So, apart from stunts and specials, the stars in cars 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 takes precedence by putting the photo out of reach of the diminutive star (when Clarkson slipped a disc, Hammond got his own back by placing a car photo at the bottom of the board). In Series 4, they also added the ‘DB9 Super-Cool Fridge’, having reviewed that car in a category of coolness all of its own (later adding another Aston, the Vantage). There has also been the ‘Crock/Classic’ Mini-Cool Wall for more vintage cars.
One definite rule-of-thumb is that any car owned by one of the presenters – regardless of how super-cool it had previously been – is automatically consigned to the ‘Uncool’ section. This seems harsh when it traps cars such as the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder purchased by Jeremy after reviewing it in Series 8, Episode 7. Comparing the convertible Lambo with the new Ferrari 430, he damned the latter (unusual for Clarkson) as boring and serious, while revelling in the madness of the baby Lambo. He openly admitted to being in love with the Gallardo and admits – like love – that his feelings were not necessarily rational (he wasn’t a fan of the hard-top Gallardo). So irrational in fact were his emotions that he promptly went and bought one, but in doing so consigned the beautiful supercar to eternity on the ‘Uncool’ end of the Cool Wall. (Note: the Top Gear team seem to like Lambo drop-tops, a style of car that had historically seen numerous supercars turn into badly handling death-traps; when Hammond went on the Paloma bull run, he happily compared the Lambo Murcielago to that adrenaline-fuelled experience.)
The ‘Uncool’ status bestowed on any presenter’s car is perhaps more understandable for James’s Fiat Panda, whose picture ended up several metres left of the board in an ‘Uncool’ anti-Aston section of its own. Usually, automatic ‘Uncool’ models include hybrids, diesels, most 4x4s, People Carriers and German cars. Worse still, the BMW 3 Series E90 was considered so ugly that it was not placed on the Wall at all.
Although many cars are consigned to oblivion due to entirely subjective reasoning, there are several hard and fast rules for avoiding the ‘Uncool’ part of the Wall: avoid buying celebrity cars; also those that are ‘fashionable’ such as Audi TTs or VW Beetles; supercars and sports-cars are not guaranteed shoo-ins; customising, accessorising or souping up an ‘Uncool’ car won’t suddenly make it cool; the cost is irrelevant but the colour isn’t; some cars are cool for boys but not for girls (and vice versa) and finally, it’s not about an entire brand, it’s each individual model.
After a fire on set in the summer of 2007, the ‘Cool Wall’ enjoyed a sabbatical before returning for Series 11 and is now long since established as a vital part of the show. As an aside, the Top Gear team also sell a Cool Wall Activity Sticker Book with its very own ‘Cool Wall’ poster, which you can put up and then attach various stickers of cars where you think they deserve to go. There is also a ‘Cool Wall’ app for the iPhone, where you can play along, too. I have both, naturally.
