Cast your minds back to the Top Gear heyday of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. What was the best part of each episode? It wasn’t the pyrotechnic stunts, the spectacular idiots-abroad jaunts, or the needling banter that contained a genuine edge of playground cruelty. It was when Clarkson, a motoring journalist and Middle England vaudeville act deliberately constructed to annoy certain demographics and delight others, sat inside a vehicle and was genuinely blown away.
The Clarkson years were crammed with gaudy spectacle – stuff was blown up, gazillion of tires were shredded, James May’s shirts – but all of that means nothing without context. Yes, that car can go very, very fast in a straight line, and we can all say “wow”, but what on earth does it mean?
Series 33 of the modern era of Top Gear (BBC One), began with Paddy McGuinness, Freddie Flintoff and Chris Harris taking an action-packed lads trip to the “pick-up truck capital of the world”, Thailand, which was diverting enough . But the show’s finest moment was when Harris sat inside a vehicle and… was genuinely blown away.
Not without coincidence, the segment did not feature the amiable but ultimately ornamental Flintoff and McGuinness, as Harris road-tested a game-changing Croatian electric sports car that can reach 219mph. Since 1977, umpteen sports cars have been driven very, very fast in a straight line by Top Gear presenters. Harris’s skill and knowledge means that where Flintoff and McGuinness – and you or I – would say “wow”, he is able to put the Rimac Nevera in the context of automobile history. When he tells you he’s never experienced anything like it, you listen.
Harris has become Top Gear’s purring engine and it’s perhaps no coincidence that as each series passes, his delivery and presentation style becomes a little more Clarkson. The satisfied low growl as a motor car pleases him, that easy manner of chatting to the in-car camera and, most of all, that… slightly hesitant… grandstanding delivery… which always ends… with a flourish.