Top Gear's Old Car Destruction Habit Got Way Out Of Hand
Earlier in the week CT Editor Matt posted a list of five cars that Top Gear used as cheap beaters during features for the show. Think BMW 635csi, Alfa Romeo 75, Jag XJS V12 and so on. Every single one of them ended up either totally smashed up or just broken enough to warrant being sent to a sweaty makeshift museum in southern England to rot.
The more I think about it, the angrier this makes me. As good as Top Gear was, is a TV show really important enough to get away with destroying so many really awesome old cars that could have been salvaged, repaired, cherished and kept alive?
Anything with a Maserati badge should be more or less sacred, as long as it’s not a Saxo with a Maser badge on it. Yes, the BiTurbo was a bit questionable at the time, but just like we always knew that good 996-era 911s would eventually get expensive, even the BiTurbo has come full circle. Top Gear dropped a skip on one. FFS.
Fair enough, plenty of the wrecks in the cheap car challenges involved cars that nobody really wants to pay to repair. That’s fine. But when it comes to the likes of the Porsche 928 from the Patagonia Special, that car would have been better off kept in the UK and restored. And then used, taken to shows and shared on forums.
That 928 was left there to be destroyed by Argentinian vandals, but don’t forget Clarkson’s prior modifications had ruined it long before that. The same goes for James’ once-awesome Lotus Esprit. That could have been turned into a prized possession for someone like us. Imagine that project thread on CT, following a dedicated owner as he or she breathes new life into an absolute classic. Wilfully driving them to their deaths is just wrong.
Even the Nova SRi and VW Golf GTi from the 80s hot hatch feature were far too good to abuse the way the show did. I can’t be alone in feeling a pang of anger when cars I’d have loved to have seen restored get thrown away.
The reason I’m so pissed at this is that some of these cars are getting really rare, and all of a sudden there’s a panicked realisation that there just aren’t that many really tidy examples of old Alfas, classic Land Cruisers, early VW-era Audis and the like.
If a car doesn’t even make it into the manufacturer’s own museum, or at least the museum’s storage warehouses that keep the extra stuff on standby, it’s probably a fair bet that no one actually cares. But that’s not the case with far too many of these cars.
Clarkson’s Maserati Merak was a prime example. In the episode where the trio had to buy a supercar each for less than £10,000, the orang-utan mercilessly kept on pushing the V6 motor until it eventually ate itself and spat its own insides out of its exhausts. That can’t be right. A good right-hand drive one will now fetch more than £50,000 in the UK, and while the one Clarkson bought wasn’t exactly a good one, someone could have made it that way.
Maybe the average man or woman on the street - who likes checking texts while driving, doesn’t flinch when kerbing wheels and gets their car washed once a year at the local machine - quite enjoys seeing old cars get destroyed. I don’t; not when there are so few of some of these models left. Here’s hoping new new new Top Gear doesn’t go down the same route - the new team have thankfully avoided the trope so far, but we’ll have to wait and see if Clarkson, Hammond and May get up to the same classic car destruction in The Grand Tour.
Leave the old classics to the enthusiasts – even the ones that aren’t quite classics yet.
Comments
You guys never made me realize how much I didn’t care that old TG old classics. I should be ashamed of myself as a gear head. Then again, I watched it for the entertainment value, like most people watching who didn’t really care they were watching really good cars go to waste.
Don’t get me wrong, it pains me to see what happened to some of these cars, just as it does looking at the list of cars traded under the scrap page scheme. But it’s generally more recently that we now know their rarity or value. You don’t get angry at an 80s film destroying a 70s classic.
Yeah, you nailed it, probably the only thing that bothered me on TG..
I actually loved the modifications they did on the argentinian cars.
“old classics” are just cars, if it’s yours , do whatever you want to it, nobody has any right to say you should leave it to “the enthusiasts” .
the last chapter of your post really annoy me.
I don’t give a damn about kerbing my wheel and I just wash my car after the winter. I once bought a 2500$ Porsche 944 and did stupid things to it, eventually it died 1 year after I bought it, quite on purpose. My current car isn’t even an “enthusiast car”, just a random daily to go to work. Am I not a true enthusiast to your eyes ? Well you know what ? If I ever buy another classic, I’ll just ruin it for the lolz, and post the video here, so I’ll annoy “princesses” , because if I’m not an enthusiast, someone washing his car twice a week isn’t either.
To be fair they really didn’t destroy the lotus… Argentina did
Not taking into consideration the fact that most of the cars were probably (hell, even likely) to be destined to become scrap anyways, they paid for the damn cars.
Plus, with that way of thinking, then noone car do anything to any car. Because that old Megane 16v your grandad still drives might become a classic 30 years from now. Nissan Silvias/200SX are getting hard to find as mint examples, does that mean that if you find one you should just put it in a glass box?
I agree completely
If I could down vote your article would. You need to understand that these cars only because valuable because of top gears destruction. Also they bought the cars they can do whatever they want with them.
Top Gear always had ridiculous budgets, porsches for under 1500 quid, 70s classic hot hatch under a 1000.
Anything at that price, is at that price because it can’t be saved. Not everyone is a dumb Brit and buy a 500 buck roller and spend 50000 on garage and repairs only to sell it for 5000.
Case in point : may
Don’t overwork your wits, you weren’t there when they bought or smashed it.
Story Time! Back when the Dukes of Hazzard was being made, they were constantly using (I believe) ‘68 Chargers. Later on during the show’s lifetime they started to notice people saying that there was a shortage of ‘68 Chargers. Given that they wrecked so many of them during the stunts they were performing. So they started using ‘69’s and ‘70’s instead. Of course they had to mask the changes but that’s what they did to combat the issue of the endangered ‘68 Chargers.
Now if we use the logic this article is based upon, we could very easily say “They shouldn’t have been using them!!!! They should’ve used something else instead of making an endangered species out of the ‘68!!!!!” However there are is one issue with this. The first issue being that there is a contradiction to this logic.
As many people have already stated, this would mean that basically any old car that you have now should be kept in the chance that it becomes a classic later on.
What I’m trying to say is this: At the time these shows were being filmed, the cars weren’t as rare and weren’t as expensive and sought after as they are now. In the case of the Charger, ‘68’s were plentiful because it was just 10 years before the show started.
If we look at the time TG filmed the episode featuring the Maserati, Ferrari and Lamborghini, this would’ve been in the early 2000’s. So there would’ve been a fair few of all the vehicles listed back then in comparison to now. None of them knew that these cars would become rare and sought after. Because at the time of filming, there was just more of them.
I get being angry that some classic cars were destroyed, however we have to think rationally. And rational thought tells us that during filming, these cars weren’t as endangered.
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