As far as matters that aren’t related to cars, when it comes to Top Gear’s Stig, it’s best to take anything he does with a grain of salt.
According to Top Gear, the popular British car show where the Stig is one of the mainstays, the white-jumpsuit-and-helmet-wearing mystery man was ‘SENSATIOALLY ARRESTED by a FRIENDLY POLICEMAN following an ALLEGED INCIDENT of some kind’.
Yes, those were the exact words from Top Gear. It doesn’t really strike you as completely sincere, does it?
According to the story, the Garda – the Irish police, if you’re keeping track – pulled over the Stig for what appeared to be a minor traffic infraction. While no details were unveiled at the time of the ‘arrest’, one eye-witness said: I didn’t see what happened exactly but it was probably really bad. Maybe he punched a swan or tried to push one of the Hairy Bikers into the river. Again."
Again, we find nothing about this story that sounds remotely like what would happen if in fact the Stig gets caught driving with his pants down. Top Gear’s been known for laying out some wicked pranks in the past, so don’t be surprised if this is just one of them.
It’s that time of the year again! With the holiday season just around the corner, you can expect that people are already lining up their wish lists on what they’d want to get this coming Christmas.
If you’re a self-respecting dude – and you’ve been a really good boy for the better part of the year - then we have something that we suggest you write on top of your Santa Claus wish list: the Top GearStig optical sensor mouse and power laps mouse mat.
It’s not all that mind-blowing as, say, a guest stint on the popular British show, but lets face it, even Santa would be hard pressed to land a gig with Jeremy Clarkson and the gang.
So if you’re not too extravagant with what you want to get for the holidays, this Top Gear-inspired optical mouse is perfect for you. The package comes with one Stig-inspired black hard top power laps mouse mat and a black optical sensor mouse that comes with its very own USB lead.
In the event that you’re not waiting with baited breath to find this on your Christmas stocking on Christmas day, you can still buy it for a rather friendly price of just £15.99.
The team from Top Gear have just been spotted filming an upcoming episode of everybody’s favorite BBC based automotive television series in Romania. The new episode will be only one of many that will promote popular driving destinations around the world in the upcoming season. The boys from the BBC were spotted in front of the Romanian Parliamentary Palace with a trio of drop top super cars. From what we could tell Richard Hammond was behind the wheel of a new Ferrari California, Jeremy Clarkson got his hands on an Aston Martin V8 Vantage roadster which left the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder for Captain slow James May. We even get a good look at the Top Gear film car, a matte black Volkswagen Passat.
Based on what we learned from the Romanian news reporter, the English television crew had been making their way across the southeast corner of the country on their way to the shoot in the capital city of Bucharest. Aside from the steps of Parliament, the trio of automotive journalists trekked across Romania’s major highway, the Transfagarasan road that bisects the center of the country running north to south, along the Black Sea coast down into the Danube delta and a few other select locations in and around Bucharest which should make for some extremely impressive shots, especially after the post production specialists at Top Gear are done working their digital effects magic.
The BBC’s Top Gear is known for coming up with some very out there tests to put cars though, except none have been as insane as this. In another test pitting man against machine, the boys from Britain are putting a rally prepped Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII against a world championship downhill freestyle skater. Now the 16 year old’s plank of wood is a purpose built off road racing vehicle complete with a suspension and large knobby off road tires. You would think that it would be no problem for the the Evo being driven by Ben Collins, but it’s true that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and the former Stig’s Lancer is having a bit of a hard time getting around the moguls on the green downhill race course. However Richard Hammond has something that might solve that problem in the form of a Paris Dakar racer, the Bowler Wildcat.
The identity of Top Gear’s masked racing driver, the Stig, is quite possibly one of the biggest mysteries facing automotive television fans and at the same time is one of the things that keeps viewers coming back week after week to watch the BBC’s best program. It would appear that the Stig’s popularity has led him to set out on his own and star as the face of a new "Where’s Waldo?" type magazine in which the white racing suit wearing top secret test driver is hidden amongst hoards of other individuals and all sorts of wacky automobile paraphernalia in Top Gear world. This is quite a paradox indeed, the Stig is mostly known for stepping into a car and going like hell, so the idea of having to catch the fastest man on Top Gear standing still is just absurd.
While the mystery of the original Stig is a closed case, being unmasked as Ben Collins, a professional racer who specialized in everything from rally car racing to stock car racing, only to have the BBC killed off the original man in black and replace him by the racer in white overalls that we know today. This lastest creation from illustrator Rod Hunt and BBC Books, “Top Gear, Where’s Stig?” has just been released and should soon be available wherever books are sold.
Aparently the sculptors at Legoland are as big a fans of the BBC’s Top Gear as we are, because as soon as they got a lead on the $60,000 Caterham Superlight R500 becoming the automotive journal’s car of the year they couldn’t help but capture the moment in Lego. Located near Windsor in England in the U.K. the four stars of the English television show find themselves at home surrounded by over 40 million other colorful building blocks in Legoland U.K.’s motor sport arena.
Legoland’s chief model maker, Guy Bagley said, “the Caterham is such a timeless and iconic car that it was a no-brainer as our choice for the motorsport area…my colleague remembered that the Stig had put the R500 through its paces and how incredible it was on the test track…it’s a design that lends itself particularly well to our bricks, too." If you just can’t get enough of this Top Gear Lego action, then do a search on youtube where you will find quite a few impressive recreations of the best television show about cars on the air today.
The staff of summer inters at TopGear America pulled a fast one on us. Remember the very strange looking Porsche Caymanshooting brake test car that was shot with a camera phone in some Italian back street? Well it was actually shot in an alley in Brooklyn, the car was a computer generated image that was created with Maya 3D drawing software, stitched together with Photoshop and then edited on Final Cut Pro to look like video from a mobile phone. They even went as far as to include a little hint that apparently no one caught on to, a Stig helmet tucked back behind the rear window.
There were three main masterminds behind the scheme. First was former TopGear.com America editor, Jared Holstein along with the renderings of Matt DuVall, a digital arts student at Savannah College of Art and Design and left to manipulate the media was Jon Masters, a master’s student in media studies at the New School in New York City. Holstein guided DuVall through some very meticulous details, like official Porsche development wheels, a front bumper that mimics the Porsche mule car as well as the same license plate number that the German automaker uses.
Once the digitally enhanced video was produced, Holstein planted it on the TopGear.com America web site while summer intern, Jon Masters, began to post links in various Porsche enthusiast sites as well as the major Automotive online media. Masters then went so far as to create a fake screen shot from Forza 3 and then linked that to other videogame websites, “It was originally posted on a Czech Forza fan site — in Czech to add a layer of deception and plausibility,” Mr. Holstein said. The group claim to have been testing the abilities of digital media as a way to introduce new designs and get a public reaction to a new figure that would traditionally take an automaker a lot of time, money and research to figure out. We’re still saying that they were trying to pull a fast one on us.
Jay Leno isn’t used to being the guest in a show, but that’s where he found himself when he was invited by Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson in a sit-down between two of the world’s biggest ‘petrol heads’.
Leno, a self-admitted Top Gear fanatic, joined Clarkson at the top-rated car-themed talk show to discuss a variety of topics only the truest of car fanatics could understand.
During Leno’s stint on the show, Clarkson playfully ran-down the list of vehicles owned by the American ex-talk show host. Predictably, the list ran long – 3 pages worth, to be in fact – with Leno defending his obvious fanaticism towards cars by saying. “I’d rather go home smelling of greasy fluid than of cheap perfume”
The BBC’s best automotive journal, Top Gear, has a problem with proper German sports saloons built for businessmen and that is that they are all just too similar. So that is why Richard Hammond decided to introduce a pair of very special GM cars from Australia. First up was the Vauxhall VXR8 Bathurst Edition. Aside from being the most popular track on the V8 Super car calendar, it is also a blindingly fast version of what we here in America have come to know as the Pontiac G8. The Bathurst comes complete with a set of racing stripes on the hood and a supercharger underneath it. The VXR8 wears some very race inspired bodywork to go along with the 560 HP and the bargain £44,995 price tag.
In one of the most exhausting road tests that Top Gear’s leading man Jeremy Clarkson has ever overseen, the BBC film crew take the little green Ford Fiesta econobox and put it through every kind of test imaginable. Starting off on the open road Mr. Clarkson remarks on how comfortable the Fiesta is, then on the Top Gear test track the GTI inside shines through. So what other tests are left for the English television host, how about being chased by a Corvette inside of a shopping mall and conducting a beach assault with the British Royal Navy. This is truly one road test for the record books.
Post a comment
Picture Gallery
RSS -
Webmaster free news |