BBC Top Gear: Bentley GTC vs. Amtrak California Zephyr

Mbta fan wrote:I've seen the India special a few times and I still laugh when hammonds car is getting ripped apart trying to winch a Bentley, keep in mind Hammond was using a Mini Cooper.

Here's some examples where James gets lost, Romania, the hot hatchback challenge where he ended up on top of a wall surrounding the town they had to drive out of. The streets were ridiculously narrow. The nuclear winter special, yes I know they had covered the windows(Hammond and may drove into each other).

Not to spoil things, but sometimes when they fail? It's on purpose. Shhh!

I know, it's almost obvious in certain episodes. Still an entertaining show.

There's another TopGear Car v. Train race from the new season of TopGear. This time it's TGV vs. GT500, London to Milan. For a change, the train wins mostly due to the faster British leg on Eurostar as well as the cancellation of the high speed channel ferries - the car had to ride a displacement-hull ferry across the channel.

The train was the clear winner until the last leg, across the Alps. In the Alps, the TGV runs on standard trackage rather than dedicated ROW. The hosts were grumbling all through that leg about the low mountain speed of the train, and I began to sympathize with them. How many times have you been on an American train where you make good time for hours but are eventually delayed to a crawl? Then I lost a bit of sympathy because they revealed the "crawl" was 70mph while the expected speed was 120+. When Amtrak runs over 70, we cheer rather than grumble.

These races are engineered to be close and thus do not represent real world conditions. In the past Clarkson has used the LeShuttle channel tunnel auto-train instead of a ferry, but that would have allowed him to win easily in this race. Moreover he was "surprised" by road works that Google maps should have made him aware of well in advance. It's not just coincidence that in each of these races the finish is only separated by a few minutes.

Tadman, u forgot at the end of that epsiode they were back in studio and clarkson blamed the loss on the French. One last thing happy 50th birthday to captain slow.