Every Top Gear Special, Ranked

Forget the presents, forget the food and drink, forget your uncle falling asleep in an armchair at 5pm. For many of us, the absolute highlight of the Christmas season for years was settling down in front of the annual Top Gear special.

Usually sticking to a format that saw Clarkson, Hammond and May ditch their regular studio-based shows to undertake some sort of perilous journey, the specials brought us some of TG’s most memorable, enduring moments, perfectly balancing guffaw-worthy hilarity and dry-mouthed, sweaty-palmed terror.

It’s a format that the trio carried over to The Grand Tour, and now that they've wrapped things up in perfect fashion, and the future of Top Gear itself is very much uncertain, it’s time we looked back and picked out our very favourite of TG’s legendary specials. As with our ranking of The Grand Tour’s specials, we need to sound the Personal Opinions Klaxon here: please don’t throw rotten fruit at us if you disagree with our takes.

Honourable mention: the Harris/Flintoff/McGuinness specials

There are obviously those out there who refuse to even acknowledge the existence of post-Fracasgate Top Gear, which we understand. That said, before it all ended under very unfortunate circumstances, the show’s final iteration was settling into something quite likeable, if very different to what had come before.

Even the biggest post-2015 TG apologists would struggle to say any of it recaptured the magic of the Clarkson/Hammond/May era, but we feel it’s worth a nod to the Nepal special as well as the Covid-era ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ special, which felt like a nice, warm hug at a time when that wasn’t really possible in the real world.

11. Winter Olympics

Bit of an outlier, this one. Technically the very first modern TG special, and aired to coincide with the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, this odd one out saw the team travel to Norway to recreate various winter sports in automotive form.

It certainly wasn’t a bad episode – none of them were – and it gave us the iconic scene of a rocket-powered Mini launching off a ski jump. But it is unquestionably the most forgettable of all the specials, perhaps if only for not following what would become the established format and for arriving at a time when the show was still finding its feet.

10. India

The India special, which saw the trio travel from the bustle of Mumbai to the remote Himalayas under the pretence of establishing trade relations, ultimately suffered from having no real end goal and too many contrived set pieces along the way.

Without a real destination, it just felt like the presenters were meandering aimlessly, and it never quite felt coherent. The highlight was arguably the cars, with the mismatch of Hammond’s diminutive Mini, May’s stately Rolls and Clarkson’s elegant Jag (sorry, Jaaaaag) exemplifying what made the automotive side of these specials so good.

9. Burma

Like India’s ‘trade mission’ setup, the premise of experiencing the long-distance truck driver lifestyle as the trio traversed the nation of Myanmar all felt a bit contrived. Because basically nobody watching it had any knowledge of the Southeast Asian second-hand HGV market, it meant that the episode couldn’t really lean into the personalities of the vehicles involved, either.

That being said, it did what the best TG specials did so well – balancing the hilarious (the wild party scene in the Shan State, the River Kok) with the serious and emotional (the visit to the Commonwealth war cemetery, and the acknowledgement that even the unpleasantness of their journey was a drop in the ocean compared to the one that had inspired it).

8. Polar

This was the other special to deviate from the traditional format of ‘difficult journey in a series of inappropriate, mechanically questionable vehicles’ – although the journey itself was perhaps the most difficult of all. The Polar special is memorable for what it actually achieved: Clarkson, May and the production team genuinely became the first people in history to drive to the North Pole.

It’s the journey there that lets the episode down a little. There’s only so much snow and ice, Hammond falling off a sledge, and the omnipresent but ultimately quite empty threat of polar bears that can be dragged into an hour-long episode, which is perhaps why the hilarious training montage at the beginning is included too.

7. Middle East

We’re starting to get into the really good stuff now. This was the most festive-themed special of all, seeing the presenters assume the role of the Three Wise Men, travelling across the Middle East to Bethlehem.

Of course, the unfortunate realities of modern-day geopolitics mean that would have been a journey fraught with peril at any point in pretty much the last 30 years or so, and that was no different in 2010 when this special aired. In the event, the biggest issue they faced was May memorably braining himself on a rock in the desert. That and the reveal of the not-at-all-controversial Baby Stig are what everyone remembers about this episode, but it perhaps deserves more credit for showing a different, more gentle take on the region than what was making news headlines at the time, and for doing so in some gleefully inappropriate cars.

6. USA

This was the birth of the standard TG special format, although it was never meant as such: it was going to be a regular episode before it was discovered that the production had too much good material to waste, so it became a full-length special.

Its premise seems almost laughably tame given what would come later – drive across the southern USA from Miami to New Orleans. Most of the journey was on four-lane freeways, for Pete’s sake. Nevertheless, the team managed to inject some danger by painting their cars with slogans designed to provoke some of the less, erm, politically progressive residents of the region. The resulting dash for the border is something everyone involved still maintains wasn’t staged. We’ll also always remember this episode for the cow on the Camaro, the steak and cheeeeeese biscuit, and for the three cars nicely summing up each presenter’s personal preference, becoming characters in their own right.

5. Vietnam

Ah yes, the one that saw the presenters ditch four wheels for two. This episode had all the hallmarks of a great TG special, and throwing in Clarkson’s complete inexperience in biking only made things funnier. Then you had the memorable closing sequence in which the trio ambled about in the island maze of Ha Long Bay, having had their bikes turned into rudimentary watercraft.

Like the Middle East special, though, what this episode did really well was provide a fresh take on a country which, to many outsiders, was entirely defined by historical events. It dealt with the things that put Vietnam on the map with a (mostly) dignified approach while making sure to highlight what a beautiful, historic place it is. TG specials were often at their best when they were one part cocking about in vehicles, and one part travel documentary and Vietnam balanced this very well indeed.

4. Botswana

‘OLIVEEEEEEEERRRRRRR!’ We’re betting that’s the first thing you hear in your head when someone mentions the Botswana special. Hammond’s Opel Kadett was a breakout star of the episode, a car he still owns 17 years later, but it was far from the only memorable thing about this episode.

The premise was simple, which is always a good start: prove you don’t need to buy an enormous SUV for normal, everyday driving (oh if only the general public of 2007 had paid attention…). That was a good setup for an often treacherous drive across a southern African nation that, again, wasn’t somewhere that had particularly received much media attention outside of wildlife documentaries before. Again, the car choices were inspired, the journey was well-paced, and we came away from it thoroughly entertained as well as with a newfound appreciation for the place it was set.

3. Bolivia

The first of two specials set in South America threw pretty much every terrain imaginable at the presenters: dense, humid rainforest; oxygen-starved mountain peaks; vast, inhospitable deserts. And, of course, the Death Road: I still remember the wide-eyed terror experienced by my 10-year-old self as the trio traversed the vertiginous mountain pass.

We once again had three very different cars, even if they were all capable 4x4s, and lots of laughs (the biggest of which comes near the beginning when May faceplants onto a gangplank). Combine that with the beautiful and varied scenery they traversed, lots of mechanical maladies and plenty of very real danger, and you’ve got all the ingredients for an excellent TG special, executed perfectly.

2. Africa

Another simple premise: go find the source of the River Nile, and do it in second-hand estate cars. The Africa special didn’t do anything particularly new, but it played the established formula so very well.

Several beautiful countries that might otherwise be overlooked, three dodgy cars entirely out of their comfort zones, lots of laughs and arguments – it was all there, and all paced out very well across a two-part episode that just worked incredibly well. There’s not much more to say about it, other than ‘CLAAAAAARKSOOOOOOOOOOOON!

1. Patagonia

The Patagonia special itself was totally overshadowed by the headlines it generated ahead of its broadcast. In case you’d somehow forgotten, the entire production team was chased out of Argentina after the number plate of Clarkson’s Porsche 928 was perceived to be a veiled reference to the Falklands conflict.

The resulting footage was some of the rawest, most heart-pounding TV to ever come out of TG, but it shouldn’t make everyone forget what led up to it. What that was a journey through some of the most spectacular scenery the trio ever visited, including petrified forests, arid deserts and snowbound mountains, in three totally inappropriate cars that punched well above their weight. Then, of course, came the emotional gut punch when Clarkson explained just why he’d picked the 928 for the journey. There was even some proper, in-depth car chat, with the entire episode framed around the V8 engine’s fall from favour.

Really, it’s a shame it ended the way it did, and an even bigger one that it would prove to be the final special of Clarkson/Hammond/May era TG, but what a note to end on.