Top Gear: Epic Failures: 50 Great Motoring Cock-Ups

Richard Porter

May 2014 · Random House

About this ebook

Designing and making cars is an expensive thing to do. So is racing them. All told, the car business spends billions every year and with such vast sums at stake you’d think the people involved wouldn’t give desk space to Captain Cockup. Sadly, you would be wrong.

Every department in every car firm and motorsport operation is capable of complete and abject failure, and on a surprisingly regular basis.

Which is what this book is about. You see, Top Gear knows a thing or two about embarrassing mistakes, as anyone who watched our India special will know. The truth is, for many years Top Gear has also regarded failure as funny. Where other television programmes edit out the moment where the presenter falls over or slams their hand in a door, Top Gear gleefully leaves it in.

So who better to take you on a gentle canter through 50 of the car world’s biggest and most glorious failures? That’s right, it’s Top Gear. Who else did you think? If you want this sort of stuff from Countryfile you might be in for a wait.

Ratings and reviews

I miss Top Gear so much. Why did the BBC even fire Jeremy in the first place? Don't get me wrong, The Grand Tour is a wonderfully stupid show, and it has all the idiocy of Top Gear, but it's just not the same somehow.

I always enjoy watching Top Gear.

This I will recommend to frends

About the author

Richard Porter is the author of over 10 official Top Gear titles and two Grand Tour tie-ins. He is the creator of online motoring satire magazine sniffpetrol.com (150k users per month; Twitter 76k), and is also one of the three presenters on podcast Gareth Jones on Speed, which regularly tops the automotive charts with approx 1,000 downloads a day. He lives in London.