[15x05] July 25th, 2010

[15x05] July 25th, 2010

  • 10

    Votes: 556 66.8%

  • 9

    Votes: 165 19.8%

  • 8

    Votes: 60 7.2%

  • 7

    Votes: 24 2.9%

  • 6

    Votes: 5 0.6%

  • 5

    Votes: 10 1.2%

  • 4

    Votes: 4 0.5%

  • 3

    Votes: 6 0.7%

  • 2

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • 1

    Votes: 2 0.2%
  • Total voters
    832
"Tonight on Top Gear...

two of the biggest movie stars in the world are in our Reasonably Priced Car...

James sets a new speed record in the fastest production car in the world...

Jeremy remembers the best racing driver in the world with the top F1 driver in the world...

...and Richard drives a Volkswagen... in some snow."
 
E-P-I-C
10/10

the first part (Touareg and partly the news segment) wasn't that good. But from then on it was just brilliant in every way. "Der Langsame" in the Bugatti was the best segment James has ever done. SIARPC was much much better than I expected. And the film about Senna was really special. I think I have to watch this episode all over again a few times :)
 
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upyourego said:
I'm glad so many people liked this - it certainly felt like the most coherent 'Top Gear' episode in a long time.

But, it's not what I've come to expect from the show and took me back to watching Top Gear around series 5 or 6 where I would end up just skipping most of the episode - that's what I did last night.

I skipped half the first review, I skipped half the veyron bit and I skipped the whole bit about some racing driver.

Last week was much better for me - I gave it 6 and most of that was for the SIARPC and the Veyron bit.
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Say again? :lmao:
 
Found this on another forum
Andy Wilman has just been on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. He said to watch the repeat of TG tonight as it is the last time that it will appear with the F1 footage due to the cost of showing it - after tonights repeat it'll be in the bin, which will be a shame as Jezza's film will have to be cut to pieces.

I think there is a listen again facility on R2 - try to catch his short interview
 
Momo63 said:
Found this on another forum
Andy Wilman has just been on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. He said to watch the repeat of TG tonight as it is the last time that it will appear with the F1 footage due to the cost of showing it - after tonights repeat it'll be in the bin, which will be a shame as Jezza's film will have to be cut to pieces.

I think there is a listen again facility on R2 - try to catch his short interview
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That's a shame, but I can't say I'm too surprised because there's always a catch. It won't affect most of us anyway.
 
One of the best episodes the've made so far. It was quite ballanced.
The first segment was a bit boring, because of the bad camerawork (I can't blame them though - must've been hard in those conditions). It wasn't entirely obvious, who was in the lead so I had to rely on RH to tell me, which he did quite often. It was one of those segments, where you'll never know, whether it was scripted or not.

James in the Veyron SS was a copy of an older segment, but that's not automaticaly bad as long as it's entertaining. For me it was. James mentioned some interesting facts (some of them the second time though) and I could really feel the tension. Last time James was driving the Veyron, it seemed pretty easy to do the 400 km/h. This time, thanks to James' remarks about tyre wear, it felt much more dangerous and you could really feel James' voice change a bit as he was strapped in the Veyron - he was nervous, who wouldn't be.

The SIARPC segment isn't worth rating - sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's not, but it's not Andy Willman's fault when it isn't, because you can't quite predict, what the guest's going the say. I'm only a bit suspicious about Tom Cruise's lap time - it really didn't seem that quick - what if he agreed to come to Top Gear under the condition, that they'll let him top their leaderboard?

Then it's the Senna segment. Maybe it wasn't all that well put together and I too was disappointed by the fact, that mister "look at me! I've nearly won the F1 championship the first season I competed" had something to say about such a legend. However - Hamilton is Brittish and a Mclaren driver - the same team Senna spent soem time racing for. I wouldn't be surprised if that F1 car actually belonged to McLaren thus making it neccessary to interview their driver Hamilton. They could've picked Button though. Otherwise, the segment showed the bright and the dark side of Senna and wasn't an ode to him, but rather a respectful tribute, depicting Senna's successes and losses. It was ballanced. I liked it a lot.

It's not the single segments, it's the whole, that made me rate this episode with full points.
 
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Momo63 said:
Found this on another forum
Andy Wilman has just been on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. He said to watch the repeat of TG tonight as it is the last time that it will appear with the F1 footage due to the cost of showing it - after tonights repeat it'll be in the bin, which will be a shame as Jezza's film will have to be cut to pieces.

I think there is a listen again facility on R2 - try to catch his short interview
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Yay torrents? :)
 
Great episode, if in my opinion not the best they made so far.

The whole Series 15 definitely tastes like Top Gear again and not like children's slapstick program, like it was too often the case in the past serieses. I keep my fingers crossed they now have worked out the right balance and keep it up, as long as Top Gear will exist. The fun of top Gear comes from interaction and three grown-up men behaving like 9-year-old children, not from some forced slapstick.

I mean, you can only laugh so much about a man getting a pie in his face (metaphorically speaking) and the crest of slapstick movies has already been in the early 1930's. No way to improve that, so why even trying?

The Touareg bit was a classic "there's no point in it but it's fun" Richard Hammond film. He's been doing that since series 1 (ever since the bus jumped over the bikes), so people who are complaing now about it being pointless, seem to miss the point and also seem to have a bad memory. I only wish they'd given the new Touareg a proper road test, instead of simply saying "Yeah, it's better now" in too many words.

News were funny, except that I keep missing real news in the news, if you know what I mean. I mean, believe it or not but there are still new cars coming out. Anyone noticed they're not talking about new cars in the news anymore? Maybe they should rename the "News section" into "Three men talking rubbish" section. It's fun, though

I thought the Bugatti movie was epic. It seems to me like the guys at Bugatti were pissed by all those ankle-biters from the USA, who thought they could come up with a faster car in a shed. I always had the feeling that they could have made the Bugatti faster, if they wanted, and now they have given the proof. Let's see if the shed builders can match that without getting a man killed in the process. Also it's very satisfying, that the Veyron now holds the lap record. But the diference to the "normal" Veyron is so big, that I think it prooves my theory about The Stig being careful with the Veyron the first time he put it around the track.
Anyway, this should pretty much shut up once and forever those, who still think the Bugatti is too heavy can only be fast in a straight line. I think it is proven now, that the Veyron is indeed the fastest production car in the world -- under any circumstances.

Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz were nice and funny guests. My opinion about Tom Cruise is a bit ambivalent, though. He obviously is quite deranged, when it comes to his "religion", but he also seems to be a nice guy otherwise and definitely is a great movie actor. I'm still not quite sure what to make of him. I've never been a big fan of Cameron Diaz and I think she isn't that pretty actually, but I guess that's a matter of taste.

The Ayrton Senna tribute was brilliant and it made me think about what would have happened, if he hadn't died in 1994. What kind of races would we have seen between him and Michael Schumacher? Now we'll never know how the two of them would have gotten along with each other. How would Formula 1 look today without Senna's tragic accident? Would we have the same level of safety in F1? Because the whole safety issue became a focus only after he and Ratzenberger died at the same weekend back then.

All in all I gave it 9 out of 10, because the 10 is reserved with me for epic TG races and specials like USA, North Pole or Vietnam.
 
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Hmm, certainly a lot of posts in this thread, I kinda got the idea at page 7 that people liked it. Well, that's nice and sure enough the Senna bit was sorta what's been missing from the show for 3-4 years, like someone else said.

I thought the documentary clip ended very abruptly, as if a huge source of emotion was taken from me with a swift whip of a hand. That lingering emotion is showing in all these posts, as people were still riding their rollercoaster while writing their comments and voting. If any, this episode would've deserved a little cooldown period after airing before people could start voting on it.

Like someone else said, the Dakar racer part was a used idea done better. So fine. Nice cinematography, very little stupidity, etc. And someone else said the review part was forced, or a joke. No, I don't think so - I believe it's just their new "more information" rule manifesting. They need to fill some sort of information quota and that review was part of that. I think that's a good thing.

After all the similar films of the past, the premise of a heavy vehicle on 4 wheels racing against light, nimble stuff with monsterous grip is getting old to say the least. For most of the race I was feeling the "oh, here we go again" in anticipation for the noisy underdog getting shafted again and a joke being made out of it. But wait, he won! Surprising, but didn't really make the beginning any more enjoyable.

Was surprised how much fun Tom & Cameron were. Of course by now I'm used to the idea that whenever someone I've heard of comes on, they have something to plug, so that needs to be taken care of first in no-brains mode. Though this time even the trailer was somewhat entertaining. Thankfully the movie ad part was very short and there was some meat there after it. I don't have huge respect for Tom Cruise with all the scientology stuff, but it almost seems like under all that lunacy there is a genuinely interesting man with some admirable qualities. Jeremy taken for donuts by Cameron Diaz in a Jag was hilarious, of course, but to be fair, doing donuts takes no skill at all, so I don't get much of the attraction. Jeremy taken for a quick lap or some power oversteer by Cameron Diaz in a Jag, on the other hand? That would've been smokin'.

Not much of an F1 fan so some of the fascination of the Senna bit was lost on me, but it was a well executed bit of documentary TV. Of course, the TG crew aren't documentary makers - there was nothing new or revolutionary about the way the bit was executed - but the information and the emotion were certainly there, and it was nice seeing Hamilton taking the old racer for a spin. But like I said, as a documentary film, there was nothing special about it. In fact, apart from much higher production values, the whole thing reminded me of the Richard Burns tribute they did much earlier, maybe in season 4 or 5. Just nice to see that they'll still do stuff like that on Top Gear.
 
Jupix said:
Not much of an F1 fan so some of the fascination of the Senna bit was lost on me,
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You're from Finland and you don't like F1? You guys perfected it!

Awesome episode. That's one to remember for a long time.

I know what you mean about the emotion thing. I kinda feel the same as I did after the V12 Vantage bit at the end of series 13. A bit empty.
 
I couldn't be arsed to write the same comment as everyone does around here, so simply 10/10. I think judging by the majority of opinions is enough clear to understand how great yesterday's episode was.
 
sobolan said:
My thoughts exactly:

"Richard's Touareg review was pretty lame." - 04/10
Sorry, never heard of a VW 3,5 liter turbo diesel. The race Touareg has a 2,5l and the road car has a 3.0l.
Having a scripted race with a Dakar racecar in 3 feet deep snow (with the camera crew "racing" in front of them) doesn't rock my boat. Also, in some footage I doubt it that RH was actually driving the car. Felt much like a Red Bull commercial event (motorcycles/snowmobiles jumps over racing cars...)

"James' top speed run was basically of the former run." - 7/10
Yeap, they could have put something extra in, beside the record run record. For example, the aerodynamic changes explained a little more (I spent 10min playing that Veyron/Veyron SS front image back and forth, just to recognize and understand those aerodynamic changes). Or how come that the SS is quicker around the TG Track by such a large margin? (200 extra HP, some less weight and less drag alone can't do that).
Stig braked just before follow-through (you can see from how the rear wing is moving)

"SIARPC - Segment" (Cameron was doing donuts in the Jag XKR, not in an Aston) - 4/10
Find them times suspicious, especially while they've missed quite a bit of the shifting.
And I found them a little fake and empty. Beside huge American smiles there was not very much to extract in the end. The SIARPC is more about the witty word exchange in the studio and not about times or lap footage. I am also not from England and do not know more than 90% of those invited but if the discussion is entertaining, I will not fast forward. Andy Garcia (also very dry dialogue) and now Cruise and Diaz...is SIARPC now a plugging bit for Hollywood stars?


"Jeremy's Senna film was good as a documentary and was interesting" - 8/10 (only because it's about Senna and they have shown footage with that epic race ending, '92 in Monaco)
Sorry, you are too generous. Poorly scripted and badly edited, almost no order in it, it was just some facts thrown in and mixed with some vintage footage. It looks like a "personal" project from Clarkson, no head no tail and shepherd's pie between.
The lame, lying midget Lamemilton does not belong in a feature video about great F1 drivers and is certainly not entitled to an opinion. The spoiled brat, Dennis' little boy. Or was he there as a chauffeur because he is driving for McLaren and they would not otherwise been allowed that race car out of the museum? Button is a much better and more complete driver.
And strange, no Gerhard Berger in it, no Bruno, etc.


Again, sorry...6/10...already almost forgot most of it.
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I very much agree with everything in this post. I saw the 10/10 ratings on this site before watching this episode and had my hopes high but, I just don't see what the fuss is about.

I don't believe that Hammond was driving that race car during some of the more extreme maneuvers, like the jumps and four wheel drifts. And when you consider how the track and routes they took made no sense, it makes you wonder whether it was even remotely even a "race" at all. Or just a bunch of clips, pieced together to make it look exciting.

Veyron was exactly the same thing as we have seen before. They could have sent one of the other guy's at least.

And I will add, I got the impression that Hamilton was acting, by being so excited to drive that older F1 car. Why choose Hamilton anyway? Is he the biggest Senna fan in he sport or something? No, he is a McLaren driver, driving a former McLaren car.

Overrated episode. The first three of the season were better than the last two imo.
 
Momo63 said:
Found this on another forum
Andy Wilman has just been on the Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. He said to watch the repeat of TG tonight as it is the last time that it will appear with the F1 footage due to the cost of showing it - after tonights repeat it'll be in the bin, which will be a shame as Jezza's film will have to be cut to pieces.
Click to expand...

I'm hitting the blue 'keep' button on my Sky+ as I write this.
 
Only thing I will say about this episode as a whole: I've just finished watching it and there's been a beaming smile on my face for the last hour.

As for the impression that Hamilton was acting about being excited about driving that car, I wouldn't think so. He was supposed to drive it last year at the Goodwood Festival of Speed but couldn't do it because the gearbox failed, so it was the first time he was able to drive that car. And, to be honest, the enthusiasm was slightly childish, but... it's completely understandable.
 
GT1911 said:
You're from Finland and you don't like F1? You guys perfected it!
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Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't like it, I'm just not a huge fan. Even a non-fan in this country is very aware of the sport and has probably spent a lot of time watching and discussing it. Me included - I've watched dozens of full races in my time, and up until recent years I was pretty informed on the current drivers etc. However, as a national phenomenon, F1 is really going downhill fast. We don't have a winning driver, the commentators we have give out an aura of monotonousness, and for a couple of years now the Finnish broadcast license holder has been making those who want to watch the live broadcasts pay through the nose. Those who don't, get a delayed "summary". As a result, very few people are still watching.

As F1 drifts into the sea of irrelevancy, so do past drivers, as great as they were at doing what they loved. After seeing Jeremy's documentary films on engineering and war, a single racing driver does not make the impact that you would expect.
 
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