Jeremy Clarkson was doing 34 miles per hour on the A3 and screaming for his life. The P45, a single-seat microcar running a 100cc two-stroke engine, was being buffeted sideways by lorries as he joined one of Britain’s busiest roads, and his only coherent transmission was a sustained howl of ‘HELP ME.’ The reason any stranger should care is that this is not a stunt: it is a precise, physical demonstration of what happens when a cheap car meets the real world, repeated across a morning of genuinely inspired engineering chaos. The chaos began properly at Top Gear’s top secret lifestyle test track, just off Lady Hole Lane, one mile to the west of the village of Ellon, where three budget SUVs were fitted with caravans and told to race in a game of tag on the oval circuit.
When the oval went badly wrong for everyone
The tag race on the oval introduced Leisure Stig, a specialist caravan tester described on the day as ‘useless but irreplaceable for caravan evaluation.’ Richard Hammond’s caravan was so large relative to his vehicle that he spent most of the early laps causing a traffic jam, while James May reported juddering and buffeting severe enough that he questioned whether his wheels were still attached. Clarkson, driving what he called ‘the 134 horsepower Vauxhall Verra engine,’ caught Hammond on the inside by riding the rough suspension-testing surface, and Hammond was eliminated. Then Clarkson overcooked a pass on Leisure Stig, lost his brakes entirely, and watched steam pour from the front of his car. The producers looked at the scene and made the sensible call: abandon the oval, move to the drag strip.
The drag strip ran toward a pond. Leisure Stig went first to establish a stopping marker, and Hammond went next in his Jeep, which was considerably faster than Clarkson’s wounded Vauxhall. Hammond hit the brakes hard enough that, as Clarkson put it afterward, ‘you hadn’t actually started braking before you got to the stig stop mark.’ Clarkson’s Vauxhall, meanwhile, could not reach 60 miles per hour at all. It topped out at 52, then ‘bullets,’ then drifted past the marker, past the pond’s edge, and into the water. James May, soaked, reported that ‘many poos shot out of me a life.’
The P45 does the school run, the West End, and a library
The P45 segment is where the programme found its rhythm. Clarkson pulled into a petrol station and brimmed the tank without getting out of the car. The tank held 1.7 litres. The minimum pump delivery was 2 litres. He squirted the difference discreetly into a bin. The two-stroke 100cc engine then carried him toward London, legally, on the A3, at a top speed that peaked somewhere around 34 miles per hour before the lorry turbulence made further speed measurement irrelevant.
The P45’s hybrid mode was more successful, if only marginally. Removing a wheel and connecting a pair of electric motors dropped the top speed to 3 miles per hour and gave a range of one hour, but it allowed a full tour of a London shopping centre and, more memorably, a full circuit of a public library. Clarkson noted that the library was considerably more interesting than the shops. When the batteries died inside the building, he was forced to push the car out by hand through a crowd of bewildered readers, apologising at each row of shelves.
That night he drove it to a theatre, bought a ticket through the window without dismounting, parked inside the auditorium, and reported that ‘the show was ace’ but the seating arrangements were cramped.
The lorry that caught fire and the cake that did not survive
The lorry challenge produced a wedding cake, an unfastened car rattling loose in Hammond’s trailer, and an electric fire in a bed of straw in Clarkson’s. The Alpine handling course gave them three minutes to complete a route of tight corners with their cargos intact. James May finished first. His cake had been straightened up slightly. Hammond’s trailer lighting was described by him as ‘smashed to bits.’ Clarkson arrived last, with his lorry on fire. He reported this in the tone of a man updating a colleague on a minor scheduling conflict.
A wedding cake with a slight lean
May’s enormous wedding cake sat at the back of his trailer after the alpine course, tilted at an angle he chose to describe as ‘straightened up a bit,’ its upper tiers displaced but structurally present, icing intact on approximately three sides.
Back on the A3 at 34 miles per hour, the lorries were doing 70 in the outside lane and Clarkson was using all the road available to him, which was not much. The P45 has no reverse gear in its standard configuration, a 1.7-litre fuel tank, and optional satellite navigation that consists of a handheld device you hold up in front of your face while driving. It fits in a lift. It is, as Clarkson noted while weaving through stationary traffic outside Guildford with the sort of calm that only genuine terror eventually produces, ‘the birth of the future.’
