How did you pop your Top Gear cherry?

sometime during season 6, i saw it on youtube. Then slowly stumbled on this site and started torrenting them all !
 
Some old website showing short clips segments way before GooTube.

Didnt know what show it was, and tried searching. Been high on it ever since.
 
been a fan since i was a few years old
my dad was a fan and used to get our english relatives to tape the show and send it over every month
first show i remember is a video on supercars from when i was probably 2
i think it was the best 100
I distinctly remember clarkson with his mini-afro and aviators having a drag race between an aston V8 vantage and a lamborghini diablo. I watched it so many times that, even 14 years later, i still remember the words.
there was also a segment on a Ferrari 456. Loved it so much my parents bought me a model and i used to rush and get it every time the piece came on

so im a life long fan
and i was also apart of the Top Gear Driving Club
i have a few keyrings and a card
Was anyone else apart of this?
 
The first time I saw Top Gear was when one series was broadcasted on the Discovery Channel 4 or 5 years ago.
 
In 2004 my company sent me to their UK headquarters for a seven month project and one Sunday evening my wife and I happened to catch an episode. We only had the 4 or 5 free channels and if we'd had Sky we probably would have missed seeing the show. The next day I went in to work and told my work friends (who were all British) about the most hilarious show I had ever seen and their response was, "yeah...it's pretty good."

We loved the show and when we moved back to the US in late 04 it was one of the things we missed most about being in the UK. Last year a friend at work asked me if I had heard of Top Gear and mentioned this forum where you could find links to the shows.

Been a FinalGear member since last year and we have watched all the shows that we missed since leaving the UK in November 2004.

Thanks FinalGear!
 
The first time Id ever watched it was when the caravan holiday episode was on. Loved that episode and decided to keep watching it regurally.
 
My story was like so many others on this forum ? stumbled across it on YouTube, seeing clips here and there. Began to look for downloadable clips on Yahoo and Google (not having become wise to the ways of Torrents and FTPs), and it led me to some guy's site that had several .avi files to choose from (Jackie Stewart vs. James May was, I believe, the first).

Also on that site was my first full episode: Bugatti Veyron vs. Cessna, Italy to London (also known as 7x05). I downloaded it, and was hooked. Took the plunge and started on the torrents soon after.
 
I'd been hearing good things about it, but not being a car person I figured it really wasn't my thing.

Then while watching BBCA last summer, I came across the caravan holiday and was instantly hooked by the rapport between the boys. Catching the Botswana and "man in a van" challenges shortly afterward totally cemented it.

Also, TG single-handedly 1) finally made me pay attention to cars and 2) motivated me to learn how to download torrents. How's that for educational?
 
I too became hooked after the caravan holiday episode aired. A few years ago, someone in another forum that I was a member of posted up youtube links to it. After that I went to youtube to start findings as many clips as I could. Shortly after I bought a huge external HD for my computer I stumbled across this site with torrents of all the episodes. About 6 months later I had every single one on my HD (~50gigs). I have been hooked ever since.
 
I was stuck in bed, with the flu-I had a very high fever (I get these sometimes-something like 104 or some such thing.) Rolling around in bed, I couldn't sleep so, in my delirious stupor, I started flipping around channels on TV. I happened upon BBC America which was running a show featuring these three strange British men who, from the looks of things, were making stretch limos out of a small Fiat, a convertible sports coupe, and what looked like half a SAAB and half of an Alfa Romeo oddly glued together (with some kind of a fountain and a mural painted in the back of it.) Because of the high fever and the odd cars, I'm still not really sure if the show even exists at all, or if any of this-the show, the board, these forums, and the lot of it, are just a figment of my delusional feverish mind.

Since there have been many rumors and reports of others seeing the show, however, I have started believing in The Stig.

:)
 
It was back in 2006, I was in study trip to europe ( im from Chile) , and one day in the hotel me and some friends saw the first amphibious challenge episode, it was epic, then when i got back to Chile I started searching for this show, and here i am
 
I watched it for the first time on BBC World in India. This was in late 90's. Top Gear then had Tiff Needell, Jeremy Clarkson, Quentin Wilson and Steve Berry, who tested bikes. I don't remember the first episode or segment that I saw but I have been hooked ever since. Later on Vicki Butler Henderson also joined Top Gear. I do remember a segment in which they were trying to come up with the car of the year.

Have been hooked ever since. Then couple of years back I discovered Final Gear and here I am.
 
I first learned about TG from another car website, Streetfire.co or something like that, they had random supercar reviews on there, i the firs one i remember seeing was Jezza's review of the Ford GT. it was soon then after that i started looking around for more and better clips, watched a bunch on youtube and then looked them up with torrents around season 9. and i found FG through a upload on mininova about six months ago. and ive been a huge fan ever since
 
It was a download of the Apache vs the Exige, then them trying to destroy the pickup truck.
 
Hmmm let's see...

It was 1996. I was only 7 years old. I believe the sole reason why I started watching Top Gear was because there was a presenter on it who's first name was Jeremy (because my first name is Jeremy). My earliest memory of Top Gear was when Clarkson was reviewing a couple of Aston Martin's. Quentin Willson was doing the results of the JD Power Survey (and I remember it was the Toyota Corolla that came out on top), and Tiff Needell was reviewing the Alfa Romeo 155.

Finally it was still using Out Of The Blue by Elton John as the closing title music.

Been watching it since then though I took a break by the end of 2000. I wasn't enjoying it anymore, then one night in 2002 I was channel hopping and saw Top Gear was on. At the time I thought it was the same Top Gear that I feel out of love with a couple of years earlier. But there was Clarkson and decided to watch it again. Wasn't too keen really on the new format until the ?100 cheap car challenge and from that episode, the love had returned.
 
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When I was in the market for an STi, I ran across the film where Jeremy drove a blue STi and a black Evo 8 in Scotland on Youtube. Still one of the best reviews imo. :)
 
for me it was watching the frace carpark supercar thing, that made me like it, and then when i went to a lan and got some full eps i watched them over and over again, now my collection has swelled to every episode. :p
 
I suppose technically my first experience of the show was the review Jeremy did of the Ford GT in Detroit, though after watching it I had no idea what the show was and did not pursue it further. The first thing I watched knowing the show was Top Gear was the A8 TDI economy run. Someone had linked to it on our American VW TDI club site. Within six months I had seen every episode made through 2006! :D
 
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It's been part of my viewing for pretty much as long as I can remember, and I was completely hooked by the late 1990s. In some ways, I see the genesis of the show we have now in some of the interactions between Tiff, Jeremy and Quentin (the Ford Puma car of the year clip springs to mind).

It's funny how things change. I've been involved in writing sketch comedy for about 15 years and back in the early days I wanted to do a TG skit. I outlined the idea and said, "right, who fancies giving the script a go," or something like that, and was met by a sea of blank faces - they all liked the idea, but none of them had watched the show. Seems impossible now!
 
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