Hello, viewers, and welcome
to The Grand Tour, the Glory and the Power,
a general celebration of the excellence of the engine.
Yes, you see in recent years,
the internal combustion engine seems to have become
something of a whipping boy for all the world's ills.
It has, and for that reason, it is possible that within our lifetimes,
you will no longer be able to buy a new internal combustion engine car
in Britain, or, for that matter, in the US,
or Belgium, or the Netherlands, or Spain, or Portugal...
Are you going to name all the countries?
I can.
Can you still do it if I drop that Cosworth DFV engine on your neck?
[James] Er, no.
The point we're trying to make is that everybody does have a bit of a downer
on the internal combustion engine,
but Hammond and I think it's worth pointing out
that the engine is also rather brilliant.
We'll illustrate this by showing you clips from films you've already seen.
Um, stuff like this...
[explosion]
[epic music]
[engine roaring]
[music continues]
[explosion]
[tyres screeching]
[music fades out]
[engine whirring]
The internal combustion engine really is a remarkable... Um...
Device?
Invention?
Thing!
Yeah, alright, Shakespeare.
The thing is, we believe nothing sums up
the wonders of internal combustion better than a big, lumpy V8.
And this brings us to the time we went to Detroit, to Motown,
and while we were there, we had a bit of a rummage around
in the modern muscle car toybox,
and then we hit the streets of that great city to make some noises.
[epic music]
[engine whirring]
[Jeremy] These are the toys we'll be using.
Three American muscle cars,
all of which have been tuned to a tyre-shredding DEFCON one.
[tyres screeching]
I have the Ford Mustang RTR spec 3.
Mr Slowly has what's called The Exorcist.
And in his whining Dodge Challenger Demon...
[engine whining]
Hammond has an erection.
[engine roaring and whining]
[Richard laughing]
To make this, they took a Hellcat, I drove one before on the show,
and just made it "more".
More of everything.
I have 840 horsepower.
A massive supercharger.
[engine whining loudly]
And on the bonnet there, or hood,
that's the biggest hood scoop ever fitted to a production car. Ever!
[tyres screeching]
Yeah!
-[engine whining] -Noise!
Noise in the city.
[engine roaring and whining]
[epic music]
[screeching]
[engine whirring]
Bloody hellfire.
[engine roaring]
This car is tuned by Hennessey.
They've taken a standard Camaro
and they've given it a thousand horsepower.
[engine roaring]
Jesus Christ.
They haven't touched anything else, only the engine.
Wheels and brakes are standard, suspension and bodywork are standard.
It's all standard.
Except the power.
Jeez! I can't even steer it.
[James laughing] It's, it's...
It's idiotic, honestly.
And yeah, though I walk in the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil.
[exhaust rumbling]
Because I am the Exorcist.
[rock music]
[tyres screeching and engine whirring]
This may look small and delicate compared to the other two,
but be in no doubt,
it has the muscle car credentials.
-[engine whirring] -[Jeremy] Oh yeah.
[laughing]
The fact is that the engine in Hammond's car
is a push rod, two valve, iron museum piece.
And May's car, yes, it has a thousand horsepower,
but it's running on standard brakes.
This, this is just a little bit cleverer.
They haven't just put a supercharger on it and left it at that.
They've stiffened up the suspension and lowered it
and stiffened the anti-roll bars.
So it can do this.
[engine roaring]
Christ!
And it can do this.
[tyres screeching]
Yes!
This then is the Anthony Joshua
of muscle cars.
Big and brawny, but it has brains as well.
[tyres screeching and exhaust rumbling]
Then there's its name.
It's the RTR, which stands for,
and I'm not making this up, Ready to Rock.
[laughing]
[electric guitar buzzing]
[rock music]
[Jeremy] These three cars then,
they're the perfect fairground rides
in our perfect petrolhead theme park.
[Richard] People travel all the way to Florida to look at a man in a mouse suit
and watch an implausible train have an unrealistic crash.
Why not come here in your car and do this?
[tyres screeching]
[engine whirring]
[music continues]
Woo!
[chuckling] What a day.
[over radio] I just can't get over James May is "The Ex-que-cist".
[James laughing]
I am surprised to see you two so upbeat about this trip.
[James] Why do you say that?
Well, you're always saying how much you don't like muscle cars.
Yeah.
[over radio] I just say that to annoy you.
Alright.
[engine whining]
Nobody intelligent admits that they like muscle cars,
but secretly, deep down,
everybody does.
They're like power rock ballads.
I mean, if you're driving along with friends
and "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey comes on the radio,
you say "This is rubbish," you huff and puff and turn it off.
If you're on your own and it comes on,
you turn it up and you sing along.
You do.
[Richard over radio] Chaps, did you know mine only comes
with one seat as standard?
Really?
What?
As standard, you get one seat in a Demon.
You can opt to have the others put back in and it costs you a dollar.
Which seat do they put in as standard?
[all laughing]
[engine whirring and whining]
[James] Full of love for our thunderous muscle cars,
we decided to find out which was the noisiest.
There were many locations we could have used for this important test,
but eventually, we found one that was absolutely perfect.
[tense music]
[Richard] What is this place?
Well, it obviously was a theatre.
They built it on the site
of Henry Ford's first ever workshop.
And when I say theatre...
[Richard] Oh wow.
[Jeremy] It's the birthplace of Henry Ford's business.
-[Richard] Yeah. -[Jeremy] Then a theatre.
It's a car park. We can bring some theatre back with our noise test.
[Richard] Actually, there's a kind of poetry to it, it's beautiful.
-Precisely. -Not just bringing the poetry.
-Also the decibel-o-meter. -[Jeremy] Oh, perfect.
[James] So you can go and go first.
[Jeremy] Why am I going first?
-[James] I just said you can go first. -[Richard] He did. I heard him say it.
[Richard] Since the owners feared the noise from our engines
would bring down the crumbling roof,
we were given protective clothing.
We have to put this on because there may be dust.
There will be dust.
[exhaust purring]
Traction off.
I'll just make wheel spin.
Wheel spin, that just makes a huge amount of noise.
-[Jeremy over radio] Are you ready? -[Richard] Yes.
[engine roaring and tyres screeching]
Oh yeah, check it out.
[Jeremy] I can see jack shit. [laughing]
[Richard coughing]
-[James] God, that's pretty horrible. -How loud?
[Richard] Well, at its peak...
-[Jeremy] Yep. -125.2.
Well, wait a minute, you don't know, you're the first to go.
-125? -[Richard] Yeah.
The Who,
widely regarded to be the loudest rock band of all time.
-Yes. -126 decibels,
Deep Purple, a mere 117 decibels.
That car is louder than Deep Purple.
But probably a lot quieter than my Demon.
-[engine whirring] -[screaming]
[Jeremy] Any minute now, a paramedic will be cutting his trousers off.
[James] He should've taken them off before he got in.
[Jeremy] True, I don't know why he wears trousers.
[Richard over radio] Here we go. Ready? In three, two...
[chime]
Oh, wait a minute, it hasn't done it.
[car beeping]
[Richard] Easy mistake.
We've all done it, forgotten the key when you're donutting
in a Detroit theatre that's been turned into a multi-storey car park.
Everybody's been there.
[Jeremy sighing] Okay. In three, two...
[tyres screeching]
[engine whirring and whining]
[engine stopping]
[Jeremy chuckling]
-[Jeremy] 125.2 to beat. -[Richard] Yeah.
Doesn't make a lot of noise.
[Jeremy] 118.8, tiptoe boy.
It's got 2.7 litre capacity supercharger on it, it's...
-But it doesn't make any noise. -Well, they didn't build it for this,
they built it for drag racing, and they wouldn't let me do that, so...
-[Jeremy] Did they? -How do we know?
Well, they did.
[Richard] Before this sore point became even sorer,
I sent James off to have a go.
[Jeremy] Don't think he's ever done a donut.
-In his life. -No.
We are about to witness James D. May
losing his virginity.
Popping his donut cherry.
[engine whirring]
[exhaust rumbling]
[Jeremy over radio] James May, are you ready?
Fire it up in three...
[engine whirring]
-[engine stalling] -[James] Cock.
[engine starting]
[engine whirring]
[engine stalling]
[James] Bollocks.
[Jeremy laughing]
[engine whirring]
[Jeremy] It took him a little while, but eventually, he got the hang of it.
What's my score?
Why don't we just go?
-[Jeremy] Well James, we've gotta go. -Yep, moving on.
-[James] What was it? -[Richard] Oh, I've wiped it.
-[James] No you haven't. -[Richard] It was twelve.
Come on. Why've I got this on my face? What was it?
It was 128, so just 2.8 more than me.
-So more. -[Jeremy and Richard] Yes.
-Hold that. -Why?
Please just hold that.
Oh, I hate the victory dance.
-I hate the victory dance. -Good, right, let's move on.
How much is your car? How much?
-98, something like that? -[Jeremy] £98,000?
Yes.
40,000.
[James] Yeah, but mine's better, so it's more expensive.
-£40,000. -Faster and louder.
720 horsepower, £40,000.
Am I the only person here who understands muscle cars?
[Richard laughing] That's a ridiculous thing to say.
James May muscle car "understanderer"
is about as convincing as James May drum and bass DJ.
Look, my drum and bass DJing is not up for debate here.
We're here to celebrate the brilliance of the engine, because I think I'm right
in saying that an engine is the most complicated
and yet most dependable thing that most of us will ever own.
Yes, you are right. If you were to leave your mobile phone
out in the searing sun of Death Valley for eight hours,
it would stop working.
But a car engine is expected to spring immediately into life
or it's not good enough.
Yeah, or imagine if you'd left, say, your dishwasher
out in the Arctic winter all day, that wouldn't work.
Your printer won't work anywhere,
and yet a modern car engine...
I mean, you can have over 800 parts
and yet they just never let you down.
Car makers routinely test down to minus 40.
At those temperatures, a human being would get hypothermia
and die within five minutes.
But a car engine has to work perfectly.
Anyway, the thing about The Grand Tour is we're not, despite appearances,
stuffy traditionalists about engines.
We have also embraced... [faking a cough]
The hybrid.
We have. We're not talking about dreary stuff, like the Prius.
We're talking about a new generation of hypercars.
Yes, now back when we were planning the very first episode of Grand Tour,
Richard Hammond said that the world's greatest hypercar
was the Porsche 918.
Jeremy Clarkson said it was the McLaren P1,
and I, of course, said it was the Ferrari The Ferrari.
[Richard] To settle this important debate,
we got them all together
and took them to the spiritual home of the hypercar, Portugal.
Spiritual home of the hypercar?
Yeah, I think I meant sardines.
[waves whooshing]
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] What we have here then are three incredible machines
which, at a stroke,
have made the traditional supercar look wooden,
and old-fashioned.
Welcome, everyone, to the hypercar holy trinity.
[engine whirring]
What a toybox today!
[upbeat music]
Sparks from Jezza!
[tyres screeching]
I don't think so, Hammond.
[chuckling]
This could be so expensive.
Engage boost.
[Jeremy] Pushing the IPAS button!
And that gives me another 170 horsepower.
[laughing]
[Jeremy] Opening DRS!
Oh, my Christ--
-Bloody mi-- -[engine roaring]
[as Murray Walker] And here comes May in The Ferrari The Ferrari.
[glass shattering]
-[explosion] -[Richard] Oh!
That bloody car is trying to kill me and I'm not even in it.
[Jeremy laughing]
[Jeremy] We could have played out there all day,
but before we ended up in a £3 million crash,
we decided to start the tests to see which of the cars was best.
[engines stopping]
We began by lining up the three most exciting cars on the planet
for the drag race of all drag races.
Naturally,
this meant engaging launch control,
which, in the McLaren, takes about a fortnight.
I have to have the drive train in track mode,
the aero package in sport mode,
so that the rear end squats when I set off and gives me more traction,
I have to have the DRS button pressed with my thumb
to keep the rear wing open,
which reduces drag obviously.
Launch control in the Porsche, left foot on the brake, hard,
right foot on the throttle, hard.
Light goes green, left foot off the brake, "pting"!
Launch button pressed for two seconds,
left foot on brake, right foot on throttle.
Press launch control, mash the throttle,
within four seconds, release the brake.
Three seconds later,
I have full boost and I have to set off then within three seconds
or the entire system disengages.
[Jeremy over radio] I'm going to get this wrong, just so you know.
I've got a lot to do in here.
[Richard laughing]
[epic music]
[exhaust purring]
[beeping]
[engine rumbling]
[beeping]
[engines roaring]
I wasn't ready.
Oh my god, that is quick.
Holy mother, did you see that?
[beep] me, Jesus [beep] Christ!
It's all over the place.
[engine rumbling]
[Jeremy] Since it was clear I'd got all my buttons wrong,
the chaps agreed to another run.
Sit-rep. The lights went green before the boost was ready,
and I had the DRS button still pressed
when I got to the end, which meant I had no downforce,
which meant well, poo came out.
This time, I'm going to do it with more drag,
which will slow me down, but I will be able to stop without killing myself.
[epic music]
[exhaust rumbling]
KERS system charged, right.
[engine purring]
[beeping]
[Jeremy] Boost building.
[engines roaring]
Three, two...
[engine purring]
[beeping]
[tyres screeching]
And we are away. What a start!
Porsche has got off to a flyer!
[James] Woah, balls.
180, 190, 210.
230 kph.
That wasn't very good.
[Jeremy] Because James had somehow messed up that time,
and because this test was about the cars,
we decided to go again.
[engine roaring]
It's a rocket ship.
For England!
No, no!
Okay, we have all three won this now. [laughing]
[rock music]
[Jeremy] Determined to find a definitive 1, 2, 3 finishing order,
we ran again.
[low tempo music]
[shutter clicking]
[over radio] Another totally different result there, gentlemen.
[beeping]
[Jeremy] And again.
[shutter clicking]
[chuckling] That's a different result again.
[Jeremy] And again.
[shutter clicking]
At this point, we decided to call a halt to proceedings,
because we had reached a scientific conclusion.
It turns out that it doesn't really matter which car you buy,
it all depends on your shoes.
Now, this is a Tod loafer,
slightly worn to give a crisper jump off the brake pedal and it's immediate.
Now this is a Converse.
-There's more sponge than I thought. -Yeah, mine's quite spongy...
See Adidas, they weren't thinking that through.
-They weren't. -See, as you lift your foot up...
It's a millisecond.
I know you've got KERS, I know you've got a 6.3-litre V12,
and I know that launch control system's amazing,
but it's all let down by the sponginess of the Adidas shoes.
So they should sell you the car and the shoes.
[Richard] No, more than that. Have you got the correct shoes,
-and have you worn them in? -Exactly.
Fresh shoes lads, I need to just run around the track a bit...
They need to be run in.
You need to skid about. There we go.
Three heavyweights coming out with cars like that at the same time.
I doubt we'll ever see a moment like that again.
Horse poo.
Well, I was only saying it was a moment. I mean...
No, I was thinking about how much the car engine has changed the world,
starting with horse poo.
Explain.
Before we had the internal combustion engine,
people went around on horses
and by the late 19th century, in London alone,
there were about 50,000 of what HG Wells called "The Hairy Enemy",
and they produced 750 tonnes of horse poo a day.
Our cities were literally knee deep in dobbin plop,
and the car engine saved us from that.
It's more than that though,
because the car engine opened our horizons.
In the 1800s, the average American travelled 50 metres a day.
Now, the average person travels 50 kilometres a day,
and some cover a lot more.
And that's good.
If we travel more, we see more, we learn more,
and we don't have to just marry whoever lives next door.
Which in my case...
Anyway, I think it's fair to say there will never be an invention
as life changing as the internal combustion engine ever again.
Good. Can we now talk about diesels?
Well, I'll tell you what about diesels, actually, Hammond.
They make a noise like a bag of spanners in a spin dryer,
they smell terrible,
they don't rev enough.
They're only really good for beasts of burden, like that tractor
that's over there, for some reason.
You're forgetting about the time we were in Dubai a few years ago,
and I found a vehicle that put a diesel engine to very good use.
[epic music]
[Richard] This is called the Ripsaw,
and it's built by a small American firm
who specialise in extreme off-road vehicles.
Their customers are mainly the military
and the people who make the Fast And Furious films.
However, if you have the money...
Look where we are!
You can have a Ripsaw built just for you
as your own private runabout.
So, let's see what it's like.
Oh, and straight away, we are in thumbs-up territory.
Gull-wing doors.
[exhaust rumbling]
Safety.
[engine whirring]
[rock music]
[Richard] It's a tank.
I'm in a tank. It's matt black.
[Richard giggling]
And I'm on the road!
[Richard] Because each Ripsaw is custom-made,
there is no definitive price list,
but I can tell you this one cost its owner
around £300,000.
[engine rumbling]
For that, you get what's billed as a high-end luxury super tank.
And if you're nine, which I am,
it doesn't get much better than that.
On the luxury front, I've got air con,
electrically adjusted leather seats,
stereo.
I mean, it's hardly a Bentley Bentayga in here,
but look at all the controls and switches.
I've got winches, work lights, a light bar.
And who doesn't want a Thunderbirds style steering wheel?
Oh, roundabout...
[rock music]
Yeah.
Ooh, yeah I'll be honest, visibility is a bit poor out the sides,
it should get marked down for that.
[Richard] And it turns out
visibility isn't the Ripsaw's only drawback as a city car.
[Richard] So here I am,
at the shops, looking for a parking space,
as you do.
[Richard] And well, you can see for yourself,
they haven't thought somebody might turn up in one of these.
[Richard] Thankfully, because the Ripsaw weighs nearly four tons
and is a tank,
it can get round this issue.
[soft classical music]
[crashing]
There we go!
I think at the next management meeting,
they'll be having a serious rethink about the width of their parking spaces.
Morning, shoppers.
To be fair, this is a very big shopping centre,
this is easier than walking, it's miles.
Ooh, that reminds me,
I need to get cat food.
[Richard] Although the Ripsaw is, in its own unique way,
a good town runabout, it's definitely at its happiest...
out here.
[tense music]
[engine rumbling]
[rock music]
[Richard] With a huge 6.6-litre diesel V8,
the standard Ripsaw is acknowledged as the fastest-tracked vehicle ever built.
But this particular Ripsaw is not the standard model.
In a normal state of tune, it's 400 brake horsepower.
This one's been taken up to 700.
And 975 pounds-feet of torque.
Nearly four tons of off-road tank
travelling at 60 mph perfectly happily.
It is mighty.
[Richard] An equally surprising sensation is the ride.
I thought because it's tracked, it'll just be solid
and incredibly brutal.
But it has suspension.
More suspension travel than a Range Rover,
so it's supple.
Suddenly, it's more gazelle than rhino.
This thing rocks.
[Richard] And when it comes to bashing the dunes,
the Ripsaw is in a league of its own.
A Land Rover Discovery can climb a gradient of about 45 percent.
This thing, 75.
That's damn near vertical.
Boom! [laughing]
This is the moment when, in desert driving...
"Oh no what's beyond, what's beyond?"
But I'm not worried, because I'll be fine.
[chuckling]
[epic music]
Yeah!
I've driven in deserts a lot,
never in something that just feels this capable.
I mean camels are good in the desert, yeah,
but this is better.
[chuckling]
What a device.
I love this thing.
[epic music fades out]
Oh, well done, Hammond, you've ruined everything.
What?
Well, we're supposed to be celebrating the glory and the power of the engine,
and you've brought diesel into it.
Yeah, in a really cool tank thing.
Well, why don't you just sit there and consider
what a completely damp dishcloth you've been,
and I will bring everything back on track.
I believe that this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.
[James] When President Kennedy made that speech to Congress
in 1961,
he gave the scientists at NASA a planet-sized headache.
Now, let me try and put the size of that headache into some sort of perspective.
When Kennedy said those words,
America's total experience in space
amounted to just one 15-minute suborbital flight
that reached an altitude of just 116 miles above the Earth.
[James] By contrast,
a journey to the moon
was 238,000 miles.
And no rocket existed that was powerful enough
to get the astronauts there.
And even if they did reach their destination,
there was then the immense challenge of getting them home again.
[epic music]
Nevertheless, the brains at NASA knuckled down
and, throughout the 1960s,
set about developing and testing the rockets
and the technology that would be needed to crack this monumental nut.
However, machinery on its own was not enough.
Equally important to the success of the space programme
were the astronauts.
Now, these men were generally of a type.
They were fighter jocks and test pilots,
and they were very familiar with moving around at very high speed.
So, and I did promise we'd get some cars into this,
when it came to moving around on the face of the Earth,
there was one car they favoured above all others.
[rock music]
[James] The Corvette.
America's "premier" sports car.
The big love-in between the American astronauts and the Corvette
started with Alan Shepard,
the first American in space in 1961.
And on his safe return to Earth,
he was given a free Corvette by General Motors,
a sort of medal for services to the country.
[James] However, even though Shepard was deemed worthy
of a tickertape hero's welcome by the American public,
NASA saw astronauts like him as government employees,
and, as such, unable to accept free gifts.
[rock music]
So, an enterprising Corvette dealer
near the Cape Kennedy Space Centre in Florida
came up with a cunning idea.
They offered the astronauts a special deal whereby they could lease a Corvette
for the enormous sum of...
one dollar.
Now, NASA couldn't complain about that,
because technically the cars weren't free, they were being paid for.
So all the astronauts bit his hand off.
[James] Gus Grissom, the second American in space, had one.
So did Gordon Cooper, a man so cool
he actually fell asleep on the launch pad while waiting for liftoff.
Jim Lovell, the hero of the ill-fated
"Houston, we've had a problem" Apollo 13 mission,
he too was a Corvette man.
Basically, in the '60s and '70s,
Cape Kennedy and the surrounding roads were awash
with spacemen driving one-dollar Corvettes.
But it was the holy trinity of Shepard, Cooper and Grissom
who were the real petrolheads.
The good news for them was that the Space Centre here at Kennedy
was criss-crossed with lovely wide straight roads,
which NASA engineers used to move stuff about,
i.e. rockets.
But that meant, as far as those three were concerned, they were in heaven.
They'd come to places like this after work and just drag race
the hell out of their cars, and then they'd have them modified,
and then they'd drag race them a bit more.
Gordo Cooper allegedly had his car modified up to 180 mph,
and he and Gus Grissom even used to go and pit crew
for a racing team if they had a weekend off.
They liked cars.
[epic music]
[James] By 1969, just inside Kennedy's deadline,
NASA was ready to try landing some men on the moon.
The astronauts chosen were Buzz Aldrin, who drove a Corvette,
Neil Armstrong, who drove a Corvette,
and Mike Collins, who drove a Beetle.
Presumably, that's why they left him in the command module
and didn't let him walk on the lunar surface.
The rocket that would take them there, the Saturn 5,
was and remains the most complex machine ever built.
[music continues]
[James] It was constructed of three million components,
all of them provided, as the astronauts used to joke,
by the lowest bidder.
And it stood as tall as a 30-storey building.
[announcer over radio] Ignition sequence starts.
Six, five, four, three,
two, one, zero.
All engines running.
Liftoff, we have a liftoff.
32 minutes past the hour.
Liftoff on Apollo 11.
[James] At blast-off,
these five engines produced 7.5 million pounds of thrust.
[James] During the first stage burn,
the rocket produced enough power
to light the whole of New York for 75 minutes.
It burnt its fuel at a rate of 20 tonnes per second
and just 2.5 minutes after launch, nearly all of it was gone.
Leaving just enough to take the three astronauts to the moon
and return them safely to Earth.
And even though 411,000 of America's brightest minds
were fully engaged in this perilous endeavour,
sending three men to the moon,
bringing them home safely again,
they were still very much constrained by the technology of the day.
If you have a Ford Fiesta,
the engine management system in your car
has 10,000 times the computer processing power that they had.
-[Houston] Eagle to Houston, do you read? -[Eagle] Loud and clear.
[James] When the astronauts finally approached the surface of the moon,
the landing was not without drama.
[NASA agent] Okay, flight controllers, gonna go for landing.
[James] The designated spot was full of craters...
[NASA agent] Eagle, Houston, you are go for landing.
[James] Forcing Armstrong to fly manually
and look for another place to set down.
[NASA agent] Four forward, drifting to the right a little.
Okay, engine stop.
Mode control, both auto. Descent engine command override off.
[NASA agent] We copy you down, Eagle.
[Neil Armstrong] Houston, Tranquillity Base here.
The Eagle has landed.
When they finally landed, they had just 20 seconds of fuel remaining.
But no matter, they were down on the moon.
[Neil Armstrong] That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
[festive music]
[cheering]
[James] Back on Earth, a hero's welcome awaited.
And once he got home, Armstrong, like so many astronauts,
would swap the seat in his spacecraft
for a seat in a Corvette.
[plane whirring]
[soft music]
[James] And when I say Corvette,
I mean this actual Corvette.
This one.
This was his.
[music continues]
Oh, my word.
I'm turning onto the space shuttle runway.
It's three miles long.
Here are some enormous skid marks left by the wheels of the space shuttle.
But this is Neil Armstrong's Corvette!
[laughing]
His hands were here. He looked at the instruments like that.
He touched that.
Neil Armstrong!
The first person to set foot somewhere other than the Earth.
I mean, almost a quarter of the world's population watched him live.
The owner of this car, when he realised what it was he'd found,
decided not to restore it.
He would leave it exactly as it was.
He would just do enough to make it run.
[James] So he hasn't done the paint, he hasn't replaced bits in here.
This is all exactly as he found it.
There's patina on the bonnet there.
There's a scuffed bit on the door. It's real.
Hello, rev counter.
Neil Armstrong's looked at you, hasn't he?
Oh, I think a Huey is coming.
There's Mr Huey, there's the evocative one.
Those are the two sounds of the sixties, aren't they?
That one and the sound of Neil Armstrong speaking from the moon.
Neil Armstrong's Chevrolet Corvette.
[epic music]
Love it. Love it!
What an honour.
[music fading out]
-Moving stuff, James. -Thank you.
And, as you rightly say, what an honour.
It was actually, it really was.
Just one question remains.
What the grunting heck has that got to do with engines?
Weren't you listening?
It had the Saturn V in it, rocket engines.
No, I'm sorry, problem here is you've dragged this thing completely off course,
and it's down to me to bring it back into line
by coming up with the top five best engines.
Actual petrol engines, I should stress.
I don't want you suggesting a film about the Flying Scotsman or something.
-Oh well, since you mention it-- -No!
Okay, best engines ever.
-Yes. -[James] I give you
the single-cylinder engine from the Honda Super Cub.
Small, simple, faultlessly reliable.
They've made well north of 110 million of them.
That has to be the greatest mobiliser of people in history.
Yeah, but what if you want production numbers and power?
I give you the Chevy small block.
The Americans have made over a hundred million of them,
and they have transported Americans for over 15 trillion miles.
-Wow. -That's like travelling
to the sun and back 80,000 times.
In a car?
Yeah. That's why they've got sun visors. You can do it.
Well, I'll tell you what, if it's a V8 you want,
and since there just happens to be one over your shoulder on that stand,
what about the Cosworth DFV?
Almost certainly the most successful racing engine of all time.
That has entered 262 Formula 1 races,
and won 155 of them, that's well over half.
If Clarkson were here,
I expect he'd want us to mention the V10 and the Lexus LFA,
because it is powerful, it's soulful,
and the noise it makes is tuned by the people who make Yamaha pianos.
[engine whirring]
If he were here, he'd want us probably to mention the W16 in the Chiron.
-Oh, yes. -Which is a heck of an engine.
And we've got a film here
about one being driven by a fat ape
on his way to a date with a Contessa.
[soft music]
[seagull squawking]
[Jeremy] Right, what all these people are looking at,
it's called the Chiron, and there's no other way of saying this,
it's the fastest car in the world.
Obviously, it isn't the fastest car in the world right now,
because I'm sort of going round the port in Saint-Tropez,
but this in fact is the Bugatti's party piece.
[upbeat music]
[Jeremy] But think about it.
This is a 1,479 horsepower,
261 mph rocket ship.
It is engineering taken to the max,
and then some.
And yet, I'm doing 20 mph
and it feels like a Golf.
It's like Concorde.
Anyone in the sky in the 1960s who's doing twice the speed of sound
was wearing a G-suit.
But on Concorde, they were doing twice the speed of sound
while wearing a lounge suit,
sipping from a glass of Château Margaux.
That was the brilliance of Concorde,
it was right at the edge of what was technically possible,
but it felt normal.
That's what the Bugatti's doing here.
[Jeremy] Eventually, I emerged from the summer-long Saint-Tropez traffic jam
and joined the motorway,
home turf for the Chiron and the monster that powers it.
It's an 8-litre monster with 16 cylinders
and enough grunt to make kilometres
feel like inches.
[epic music]
[engine roaring]
[Jeremy] We all thought the Veyron was fairly amazing,
but this has "out-amazinged" it.
Let me give you a few of the headline statistics.
The Chiron accelerates from 0 to 186 mph
faster than a Toyota Hatchback accelerates from 0 to 60.
[Jeremy] Flat-out,
this will drain its fuel tank...
Ready? In nine minutes.
And to put that in a language the youth can understand,
it's like drinking seven shot glasses full of petrol
every second.
The Chiron has ten radiators.
That's more than I've got in my apartment.
And then there's the water pump,
which sends 200 gallons of water a minute
round the engine.
That could brim a bath in 12 seconds.
Firemen use less powerful pumps than that.
[engine whirring]
[engine stopping]
[Jeremy] Okay.
What I'm going to do is demonstrate to you
the difference between
a really fast car and a Bugatti Chiron.
[tense music]
[exhaust purring]
[lights clicking]
[tyres screeching and engines roaring]
[Jeremy chuckling]
80, 96, 105, 130, 154,
163, 200, 207, 223...
Hell!
[car whirring]
[Jeremy] Drag race over.
I got back on the road.
And my skates on.
[soft music]
Not that you could actually hear that I had my skates on.
[Jeremy] The only really odd noise you get in a Chiron is the whoosh
of the turbo-charging system. Ready?
[turbo sighing]
-[turbo sighing] -[Jeremy chuckling]
It's actually relaxing.
It sounds like small wavelets
breaking on a tropical beach, here we go.
[turbo sighing]
What this car is
is just a really nice comfortable place to sit
while it gets on with the business
of smashing continents.
[Jeremy] And that's exactly what it'd have to do if I were to be on time
for my dinner date with the Contessa in Turin.
Happily, I soon left France,
where they rip your fingernails out if you break the speed limit,
and entered Italy where, so far as I can tell,
speeding isn't really seen as a crime at all.
[Jeremy] I was once pulled over by the police in Italy
when I was driving a Lamborghini,
and they told me I wasn't driving quickly enough.
[in an Italian accent] "It's a Lamborghini, when you leave here,
you drive like the wind."
This is my instruction from the police.
[chuckling]
[upbeat music]
Right, it's 47 miles to Turin,
I've got 45 minutes to get there,
and I'm never late.
I'm pathologically punctual.
[Jeremy] By taking the police advice and driving like the wind,
I made it to the outskirts of Turin
with 11 minutes to go.
And I had to spend one of those minutes getting changed in the bogs
at a motorway service station.
Right.
I have got nine minutes
to make this rendezvous.
This should be interesting.
[Jeremy] There was a film called Rendezvous made in the 1960s
when someone tried to cross Paris
in nine minutes.
Well, now it was time to put that 16-cylinder engine in race mode
and make an homage to that.
[engine roaring]
[brakes squeaking]
[honking]
[engine purring]
[tyres screeching]
[tram bell chiming]
20 seconds.
[Jeremy] Made it.
[car door slamming shut]
[church bell ringing]
Well, if you were wondering who the next James Bond is gonna be,
that's narrowed it down a bit: it's not him.
Well, unless they want to take the character in a sort of fatter,
more out-of-breath direction.
Yeah. So far, in our celebration of the engine,
we've looked at petrol powered V8,
V12, and just then, W16
Yes, and thanks to Hammond, it's also featured a "diseasal".
And thanks to James, some inexplicable stuff about astronauts.
It had Corvettes in it, you dimwit.
[Richard] Whatever.
Before we end our celebration of the engine,
we feel it's quite important that we issue a dire warning.
In some circumstances,
use of an engine can lead to your house blowing up.
And for evidence of it, we must return
to our test of the holy trinity of hypercars.
[Jeremy] It was time to bring in a racing driver,
to see which of our cars could do the fastest lap.
Jérôme d'Ambrosio,
who's done Formula 1 and Formula E.
[engines whirring]
[James] Once the mechanics had finished their preparations,
the three-speed traps were activated.
And the Ferrari The Ferrari took its place on the start line.
Look how good it looks there.
This is just wasting time, it's wasting rubber and fuel.
-No, this is like an amuse bouche. -Yeah, it is.
You've ordered the duck and the sherry trifle.
And you're a melon ball.
-[Jeremy laughing] -I'm not even listening.
[tense music]
[car beeping]
[engine purring]
[engine whirring]
-[Jeremy] Gentlemen... -[Richard] Oh right.
It was doing 231.4 kph at the end of the straight.
That's about the same speed as like a Golf diesel.
[engine roaring]
194.9.
Going down the hill using gravity assist.
-Is he stopping off for shopping? -He must be.
[engine roaring]
Here he is.
[tense music]
Thank you very much, James. You want to go and get a cup of tea?
Well, we've warmed the track.
[Richard] Next, it was the turn of the Porsche 918.
How much faster will it go because of the stripes, do you think?
Much.
-[epic music] -[engine rumbling]
[engine whirring]
231 point...
[Jeremy sighing] So he's faster than the Ferrari.
[Richard] That's 183.0.
Way, way, way slower than him.
Don't forget between here and the next measuring point,
okay, you've got four slow corners,
and those are the ones where the Porsche is going to make up the time.
-Because of the four-wheel steering. -Oh, like a Honda Prelude.
No!
-[James and Richard] 110. -[Jeremy] 110 point what?
[Richard] One.
[Jeremy] So almost to a tenth of a kilometre an hour,
the same speed as you.
[Richard] Here it comes, there's firing noises.
There it is, look at that.
[car whirring]
[tense music]
[Jeremy] Finally, it was the turn of the psycho killer,
the trickiest, the edgiest of the three.
But I was so confident it'd win,
I was prepared to take a massive gamble.
If the McLaren isn't the fastest,
you two can knock my house down.
-What? -Knock it down.
-What, your house? -[Jeremy] Yeah.
And I mean that.
That's how confident I am that that will be the fastest.
-That's a... You know we will do that. -[Jeremy] Yeah.
-[Richard] It's a serious bet. -Yeah.
-Fine. -If that's not the fastest,
-we can knock your house down. -[Jeremy] Yep.
-You know where it is, you've both been. -Yeah.
I'd love to knock it down.
[clanking]
[exhaust rumbling]
[beeping]
Here we go. A lot riding on this.
[engine roaring]
[tense music]
[engine stopping]
[Jeremy, James and Richard] 235.9.
Okay, it's fastest at the end of the first straight.
[engine roaring]
Would you like to come to my house for dinner?
Yes, can I bring a bulldozer?
[tense music]
[tyres screeching]
188.3.
[Richard] That is worryingly quick.
-It's quite brisk. -There's no... it's quite brisk?
We don't know how fast it's going round the tight turns.
It might have been doing 2 kph round here.
[engine roaring]
[Jérôme mumbling] Oh God...
[whispering] Where is he?
[Richard whispering] Crashed.
[tense music]
With that, back to the tent.
[applause]
Thank you so much.
Now, I want to make it absolutely plain,
because I know this matters to anoraks,
all three cars were running on exactly the same sort of tyres.
Yes, same tyres, same track, same driver.
So the times are down to the cars.
Yep. And now, it is time to reveal those times.
And let me just make it absolutely clear,
-we don't know what they are. -[Richard] No.
The producers have kept them from us, they're top secret.
-Yeah. -So let's put the scoreboard up
and let's begin with the Ferrari The Ferrari, I believe.
Let's see what it did it in, please.
[James] 1:54.4.
We don't know if that's any good, do we?
No, well.
Let's move on and do the Porsche next, let's have a look.
What did the Porsche do it in?
[Richard] Oh, yes!
-[applause] -1:54.2!
Yes, yes!
You see? You said it would mince the Porsche,
and it didn't mince it, it was slower than the Porsche.
I told you, it's just a melon ball.
It's slower than my car,
which was faster than your car!
Yeah, point two of a second, and it looks better.
Yeah, it did, in my mirror, where it belongs getting smaller.
It's a melon ball and it lost.
-Hammond. Calm down. -What?
-Alright. -[Jeremy] Because now,
we must bring up the time that really matters.
-[Richard] Yeah. -The one where a lot's at stake.
The McLaren... The McLaren P1.
-Are you nervous? Sure? -No. No.
-Little bit? -No, I'm not nervous.
Why be nervous? You could get a trolley to keep your things in it,
move it about,
make some new friends under a bridge somewhere?
-Hammond... -I'd say sell your body, don't do that.
Be quiet.
Let's... let's bring up the time of the P1, here we go.
[Richard] Oh, god...
Where is it?
[James chuckling]
[shouting]
Yeah!
[applause]
So, when we said that use of an internal combustion engine
could cause your house to blow up,
we weren't being strictly accurate, were we?
Well, no, it doesn't just blow up on its own.
It needs a bit of help.
Short ceremony, say a few words?
Nah...
[glass shattering]
[explosion]
[sighing and chuckling]
-[Richard] That... -[James] That got it.
Well, as they used to say in the adverts,
come home to a real fire.
And that concludes our celebration of our old friend, the engine.
We hope you've enjoyed what you've seen. If you haven't,
please address your complaints to Jeremy Clarkson,
Care of Jeremy Clarkson's Farm, Clarksonshire.
And don't forget to fill the envelope with wasps.
[together] Goodbye.
[theme music]