Jeremy Clarkson pulled up to the Monaco coastline in a fly-spattered Aston Martin DB9 and delivered the kind of understatement only a man who had just beaten a famous French express train could manage: it was, he said, ‘a big tick in my life box.’ That single moment captures why Top Gear‘s race specials became appointment television for anyone who has ever sat in traffic and quietly believed they could do better. These are not tests of machinery. They are tests of nerve, logistics, fuel math, and the very human desire to arrive first regardless of the odds.
The DB9 versus the Blue Train from Cannes to Monaco
The first race sets the template for everything that follows. Clarkson in the DB9, Richard Hammond and James May aboard the train, rolling south through France toward Monte Carlo. The DB9 is the story here, a car Clarkson had spent the drive falling for. He praised the six-speed automatic’s paddle system, which blips the throttle on downchanges with a satisfying double-clutch bark, and noted how the heavy steering puts the effort back in the driver’s hands. ‘When you kiss an apex just right,’ he explained, ‘you feel like you did it, like you’re responsible. It was all your own work, not the car’s.’ The French speed limits nearly ended him. With 200 miles to go the train surged past, but the coastal route slowed it through Nice, and the gap began to close. Clarkson sprinted the final miles to Monte Carlo. May and Hammond got lost with a map. The DB9 won.
London to Oslo by every method imaginable
The Blackpool Illuminations race sends all three out of the Channel Tunnel on a Friday night with over 300 miles to cover and fuel gauges heading toward disaster. Hammond took the M1 and M6, May cut across to Leeds and over the M62, Clarkson ducked onto the M40 past his house in Chipping Norton. The Jaguar XJ’s twin-turbo eventually went range-zero with 36 miles still to go and kept moving anyway. Hammond crossed the finish line first. May, attempting every motorway in northern England, arrived just too late for the switch-on. The Norway race escalates the chaos further: Clarkson in a Volvo C30 across Sweden while Hammond and May rode a powerboat up the coast from Kristiansand to Oslo. The powerboat lost an engine and sank. They transferred to a smaller inflatable. That one burst. They washed ashore in an unknown Norwegian town, found a bus, and arrived in Oslo long after Clarkson was already sitting by a hot tub looking smug.
London across Europe to Milan, then Tokyo, then the Arctic
The races keep escalating in geography and absurdity. The Milan chase pits a Ford Mustang against a high-speed train through the Alps, with French roadworks through the Mont Blanc tunnel costing Clarkson the lead at the worst possible moment. He emerged into Italy and buried the throttle: ‘Oh, you beauty.’ Hammond and May crossed Milan by metro and ran the final stretch. Hammond ran faster. The Tokyo race puts a Nissan GT-R against the Shinkansen and city transit, complicated when the train splits at a station and deposits Clarkson on the wrong half. He found a policeman who spoke approximate English, eventually got the GT-R up a mountain road toward the Great Buddha at Kotoku-in, and arrived three minutes and twelve seconds after Hammond and May. ‘That is so close,’ Hammond said, and genuinely meant it.
The Arctic expedition is the outlier, a race to the Magnetic North Pole between Clarkson and May in a modified Toyota Hilux and Hammond on a dog sled with a guide named Matty. Hammond skied alongside the sled for roughly nine and a half hours on the first day and covered 36 miles. The team ran the dogs through the night at minus 35 degrees Celsius when the cold made them faster. Bears appeared on multiple occasions. James fitted a ‘bumper dumper’ to the Hilux’s tow bar and treated the whole exercise as a mild inconvenience. Clarkson brought a Jesus action figure for guidance. The car reached the pole first.
The moment May missed everything by standing on a train platform
In the London race, while Clarkson was pushing a speedboat to 70 mph on the Thames and Hammond was threading a bicycle through traffic, May was navigating the Tube, the Docklands Light Railway, and a connecting service to London City Airport. He arrived 15 minutes after Hammond had already checked in. ‘You’ve ruined Top Gear,’ Hammond told him. May did not disagree.
The DB9 that started it all crossed the finish line in Monaco still carrying the flies it had collected somewhere in the hills above Nice, proof that a car driven flat-out through France acquires its own kind of trophy whether the driver plans for it or not.
