7 Ways You'd 'Fix' Top Gear

Leave the crowd alone

One of the many cringeworthy aspects of Top Gear’s studio segments was seeing Chris Evans trying to gee up the crowd. It’s not necessary and as said by suggester Its_Sufy, “leave the crowd to do their thing.”

More Harris, more Reid

While we found Top Gear on the whole pretty disappointing, the Extra Gear spin-off was enjoyable. Why? Because it centres around two car guys who know their stuff talking about, well, cars. While a show intended to have as mass an appeal as Top Gear probably wouldn’t work with just the relaxed Extra Gear format with the budget turned up a bit (well, a lot), it’s clear Chris Harris and Rory Reid are criminally underused.

Neither were in the first episode, and when we spoke to Rory Reid last week, he mentioned he was only in four of the six episodes of the main show. And it’s probably fair to assume he’ll only present one segment in each of those four. As the two people who are the best and most engaging at presenting car content, they need to be in TG a hell of a lot more than that.

Tell Evans to calm down

The complaint we heard most last Sunday was that Chris Evans was shouting too much. His presenting style was needlessly over-the-top, and it started to grate. He’s perfectly capable of presenting in a calm manner, so if he just turns it down a notch and stops thinking he’s on TFI Friday, it’ll be a big improvement.

Get rid of Evans entirely

A lot of you just don’t seem to think Evans is right for the show and should be ditched entirely. We’re not sure who would replace him in that situation (some seem to think Matt LeBlanc could be the solo main host), but this is certainly a popular opinion!

Give challenges a proper back story

“That Reliant Robin [actually Realtos, if you want to be pedantic!] challenge was pointless. It had no reason to be done, that’s why it was boring,” says CTzen Agustín J. Ruatta, and we have to agree. It wasn’t ever properly explained why Evans and LeBlanc were driving around in these cars - one minute we were in the studio, the next we were watching this dull and unimaginative segment.

Team up for the challenges

There isn’t a whole lot of chemistry between the presenters right now, but that’s to be expected - watch back some of the really early episodes of 2002 onwards Top Gear when Clarkson, Hammond and May were first brought together, and you’ll find the three are all a bit wooden when interacting with each other.

However, an interesting way of spicing things up might be for the six presenters to split into two groups of three for some of the challenges. More screen time for those who deserve it, and an interesting dynamic we never saw pre-presenter change.

Rip it up and start again

This is the one we agree with most. So far the show has felt like a missed opportunity to completely reinvent something which was starting to feel tired under Clarkson, Hammond and May. Simply doing the same sort of things - right down to Evans seemingly imitating Clarkson’s intro voiceover style - with a new bunch of people is going to feel odd, and lead people to making unfavourable comparisons with the version of the show presented by those three.

In the week leading up to the first episode, Chris Evans said “If you’re changing the presenter line up completely, that’s pretty much change enough…It wasn’t broken, so why would we change it that much?” Sorry Chris, we disagree - there are plenty of reasons why it needs to be changed. It’s not too late though, so we can hold out hope…

Click here to read the original community thread!