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.