Top Gear break a classic

[garcon]

Hang on. Has the programme been aired yet? Has anyone seen this footage? Or is everybody making assumptions on what Top Gear did to the car based on comments higher up? Honest questions, folks.

Clarkson does seem to enjoy doing the odd burnout and donut in things these days, but I have never seen The Stig do anything other than drive round that track very quickly. Of course he has been known to get in the odd spin and do a bit of offroading now and again, but all in the process of finding the limit.

Talking of Renaults, I have to say I was mighty impressed with what they did with that Megane last night. And even more impressed with how it stood up to the impact.

[touringlegend]

I did see Richard Hammond holding a newspaper with a historic looking car on it on last nights show.

Thing about Renaults though, is they spontaneously ignite like the ones down my local scrappy!

[ensign14]

Originally posted by Nordic
I however think the matter that irked Hamilton was Clarkson at the others refering to Hamiltons father being drunk when he was driving the car to its historic win.

To be fair, that's in Duncan's autobiography...I think Tony Rolt's family were rightly annoyed, a good yarn but no more.

[avsfan733]

I think the truest show of skill in a driver is being able to drive a car hard and not break it. Obviously that got lost somewhere on our top gear frined. Its a lemans car i don't think its all that asy to break, unledd you put in someone who managed to crash a movie car unintentionally

[Edgar Jessop]

It is a sad reflection on the age we live in when that charming Adrian Hamilton who is definitely one of the nicest people I've ever done business with, should be reduced to publicising his car-sales business by having to be associated with a famously drunken but otherwise not too successful sports car racer.

[EvilPumpkin]

Has anyone yet seen footage of what was done with the car? I'm still interested to learn exactly what happened to cause the damage.

There's a lot of talk about the car being driven badly - either carelessly or deliberately - but do we actually know that to be the case?

[TimD]

Have a look at Atlas' equivalent thread about this matter, and especially post #17 from esteemed motoring historian and thoroughly principled chap Doug Nye.

http://www.atlasf1.com/bb/showthread...threadid=58420

[DMC]

After all the fuss made over this issue, I wouldn't be surprised if the show that goes to air is conveniently edited to protect some parties involved.

[Richy_Rich]

Originally posted by Craig Antill
That's too funny! What a miserable prat! What did he expect? If he was concerned about possible damage then he should have agreed a suitable compensation arrangement when offering the car.

Or bought a Nissan Micra instead

Apart from the 'twisted drive shaft' the other things are consumables anyway, tyres, clutch. Might as well moan that they used some petrol as well.

[krt917]

Reading Doug Nye's comments, it seems to me that the fuss is as much due to the ATTITUDE that Top Gear appear to have had towards what is a very historic car. If it had been worn out or damaged in normal, hard running, I expect Mr Hamilton would have stayed quiet, but to perform doughnuts and other unnecessary 'stunts' with the car is unacceptable and the BBC should acknowledge that.

[Truckosaurus]

The show with the C-type footage was shown I couple of weeks before Le Mans, so the filming was probably a month before it hit the papers.

At the time I thought that old Stiggy was throwing it around a bit.

[bacon sandwich]

What I don't understand is why they think the viewers would want to see an historic sports car thrashed and trashed anyway ? - surely it's nice just to see it driven well and shown some respect because of what it is. It does seem that Top Gear these days don't know how to do anything unless it's sideways with lots of smoke coming off the tyres! but then I s'pose it is more for the hoonin' boy racer these days than the real car enthusiast, but it sounds to me as though it wasn't necessary to do what they did to such a classic and I agree that Hamilton leant them the car believing they would treat it with respect but I'm totally with you Evil that at the very least surely you would stay around to see what they were going to do with it and to step in if required but then as I said one presumes he probably thought they would look after it - perhaps Top Gear need to grow up just a little bit ?

[Smokey 6 litre]

it was stupid, by both parties, top gear should never even consider driving it like that, but the owner should've known that there was a chance it would be.
i say the answer is to shoot Clarkson!