Top Gear season 25, episode 5: has the show hit its stride?

Italian supercars, a ‘muscle car’ that’s banned in Europe and an absurd track-focused tractor took centre stage last night in another adrenaline-fuelled episode of Top Gear.

Kicking off the fifth instalment in the BBC motoring show’s 25th season, presenter Matt LeBlanc headed to Italy to put Ferrari’s new 812 Superfast through its paces at the Imola circuit, the former home of Formula 1’s San Marino Grand Prix.

After drifting the supercar around the track for a few laps, LeBlanc paid tribute to the legendary F1 driver Ayrton Senna. The three-time F1 champion was killed following a high-speed crash at the circuit in 1994.

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Meanwhile LeBlanc teamed up with Chris Harris to build a high-performance tractor, called the “Track-tor”, in a bid to help alleviate traffic problems caused by slow-moving farm vehicles.

Later in the episode, Rory Reid travelled to the US to review Chevrolet’s new Camaro ZL1 1Le with the help of German racing driver Sabine Schmitz.

According to Reid, the muscle car is banned in Europe because the carbon fibre winglets on its front bumper could be dangerous if the car were to hit a pedestrian.

So what do the critics think?

Following mixed reviews of the previous episode, Digital Spy says last night’s show was “the highlight of the entire series.” The programme has clearly found its “fun factor” and appears to be on course for “an exciting new era”.

Reid’s review of the “forbidden” Camaro muscle car was the episode’s stand-out feature, the site says, acting as a brilliant follow-up to his short film on Japan’s underground car culture in episode three.

Fans may be divided over the Track-tor section, which was “mostly just an excuse for LeBlanc and Harris to look silly in an over-powered tractor,” The Daily Telegraph says.

But the wacky tractor scenes were joined by a pair of thorough car reviews, making the episode feel like “a proper petrolhead spread”.

19 March

Top Gear season 25 episode 4 review: US dragsters, Korean racers and French icons

After a manic road trip across Japan last Sunday, Top Gear headed back to North America shores for a high-octane sprint between a US military aircraft and a muscle car in the latest episode.

This week’s instalment kicked off with presenter Matt LeBlanc driving the new drag-focused Dodge Challenger SRT Demon to southern California, where he then helped with the landing of an airborne Nasa ER-2 research plane - based on a Cold War-era U-2 spy plane.

As The Daily Telegraph explains, the ER-2 has a “wonky landing gear – which resembled a unicycle strapped to the bottom of the aircraft” - and therefore requires a high-speed “spotter” plane to race ahead and guide it down. Thankfully, the 829bhp Demon was up to the challenge.

Later in the show, LeBlanc joined co-star Chris Harris for a trip to southern France in a 70-year-old Citroen 2CV, to decide if the retro car is a motoring icon or a glorified city runabout.

Meanwhile, Rory Reid trialled a pair of Korean performance cars, the Kia Stinger GT and Hyundai i30N, around the TV show’s test track at Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey.

So what did the TV critics think?

This latest episode “stalls a little” at the beginning, says Digital Spy, but finishes on a high with LeBlanc and Harris’s 2CV adventure.

Each presenter’s segment was “focused on the cars”, a welcome development after the crazy stunts of the first two instalments in the new series, the website says. But each segment felt “isolated” compared with the “grander, challenge-filled road trips earlier in the season”.

The Daily Telegraph agrees, dismissing LeBlanc’s Dodge Challenger Demon film as “another ho-hum Top Gear” segment filled with loud engine noises and clouds of tyre smoke.

The most noticeable aspect of the episode, the newspaper says, is the growing sense of Rory Reid being the “third wheel” in the trio. Reid remains restricted to the confines of the Dunsfold circuit, while the other two presenters take part in more glamorous excursions.

Nevertheless, the new season is proving to be a hit with fans, and episode four was no exception. One Twitter user even argued that the new series of Top Gear could be better than the latest season of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May’s Amazon Prime motoring show, The Grand Tour.

12 March

Top Gear seasons 25 episode 3 review: LeBlanc and Harris take road trip across Japan

Top Gear headed to Asia for an adrenaline-fuelled road trip across Japan in last night’s episode of the BBC Two motoring show. The trip comes hot on the heels of the team’s adventures in the US, where episodes 1 and 2 were filmed.

The third instalment in series 25 features presenters Matt LeBlanc and Chris Harris buying a couple of Japanese-built nineties sports cars from an auction house where 15,000 motors are traded daily. They are then tasked with exporting the cars to the UK for maximum profit.

After selecting their sports cars, the presenters set off from the auction house in Tokyo to the Tohoku Region in northern Japan. Along the way, the duo take part in some drifting at the Ebisu circuit and visit the site of 2011’s nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

Meanwhile, co-star Rory Reid takes viewers through some of the more outlandish aspects of Japan’s car culture. Some of the bizarre toys he shows us include a road-legal Porsche 962C Le Mans car and a host of heavily modified Lamborghinis that make the robots from the Transformers look positively tame.

Critics are once again full of praise for the BBC motoring show, with Digital Spy applauding the episode’s change of pace.

The challenges in the secondhand sports cars, however, “turn a little predictable” and the use of Japanese-inspired graphics for Harris’s review on the Lexus LC500 at the beginning of the show are described as “cheesy”.

But The Daily Telegraph disagrees. It says the “Akira-style animation” is “eye-grabbing” and looks as though it’s been taken straight from a 1980s anime movie.

Still, the paper says the new presenters “acknowledged Japan’s neon-streaked idiosyncrasies” without making “a year’s supply of Geisha-puns” and gags about the “mis-pronunciation of the letter ‘r’”. In other words, none of the predictable jokes you might have expected from the previous hosts of Top Gear.

5 March

Top Gear season 25 review: fans praise ‘awesome’ second episode

After last week’s critically-acclaimed start to Top Gear’s 25th season, the motoring show returned to BBC Two on Sunday night to rave reviews from fans.

The new episode is a complete departure from the season premiere. Presenters Matt LeBlanc and Chris Harris swapped their V8-engined sports cars (used for their road trip across Utah in the first episode) for an arsenal of off-road machinery.

Using vehicles ranging from a Ford F650 Supertruck to a flying buggy, the pair travelled across the forest-covered hills of northern California looking for Bigfoot.

Fans were full of praise for the season’s second episode. Many of them took to Twitter to share their verdicts.

One fan wrote: “Best ever episode of the 'new' top gear this… F$#*ing awesome”.

Others, meanwhile, said the “chemistry” between LeBlanc, Harris and co-star Rory Reid continued to improve. It’s an area that had come under fire from reviewers in the show’s previous season.

But much like previous episodes, several fans called for the return of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, the original trio and the stars of Amazon Prime’s Grand Tour.

The episode was also well received by critics. Digital Spy, for instance, said the “scripted chatter” between LeBlanc and Harris about finding Bigfoot was a “highlight” of last night’s show.

While the hunt for the mythical creature was “ridiculous”, says The Daily Telegraph, the segment was “carried off with an admirably straight face.”

Top Gear airs on BBC Two on Sundays at 8pm.