The producers of Channel Five motoring show Fifth Gear are quick learners: it only takes them one or two seasons after a format change to figure out how to make the show interesting again. This would be more of a virtue if they didn’t revamp the show about every three seasons, but we’ll take what we can get.

The pointless crush my car/breakdown/stupid car tricks segments: gone. The daytime-TV interstitials: less cutesy and less traditional (though some may not like the new Paul Greengrass shakycam feel to the new interstitials). The great reviews and insightful chatter: piled on! More Tiff: check. More Tom: check. Really, it’s an improvement on almost every element of the last season, itself a major improvement over the horrific season 10.

The 12th season really leaves just one major problem spot to deal with. Why is it that the British motoring shows seem to think we want more celebrities in our shows? Perhaps I’d care more if I actually knew any of the British footballers and talk show hosts Fifth Gear has on every week, but even if you replaced every single one with Christina Ricci the celeb segments would still be horrible. Celebrities driving cars do not often make for good television, and definitely not when Jason Plato pulls his usual “ha ha, look at how much I can scare the civvies by driving sideways!” schtick. The only segment in recent memory that bucked this trend was the Girls Aloud segment, and then only because one or two of the women actually seemed interested in going fast. Even then we got Plato’s lovely “don’t let girls around your Ferraris” comment at the end. Even that was ten times more exciting than the usual “let’s give this cricketer a Lamborghini and see how fast he can drive it” spot.

So consider this another well-reasoned plea to the producers of Fifth Gear. This time we’re only asking for one thing: remove the insipid celebrity fawning spots, add in another car review (or hell, bring Jon Bentley back in front of the camera, he was actually making decent, informative segments before he disappeared), and suddenly you’ve got a top-notch, high-quality show that acts perfectly as the higher minded, more journalistic compliment to Top Gear’s crazy antics.

Of course, if the usual trend continues, next year we’ll get an all-new Fifth Gear where Vicki Butler-Henderson co-hosts with Clint Eastwood’s monkey live from the Chunnel tunnel, Tiff Needell is replaced by Tim Lovejoy in drag, and all the segments feature Geri Halliwell giving you tips on how to do handbrake turns. Stay tuned.

Colin McRae, legendary rally driver and winner of the 1995 World Rally Championship driver’s title, is dead after a helicopter crash. All that’s left, essentially, is to officially identify the bodies, but McRae was believed to be piloting the helicopter and there were no survivors. Also on board was his five-year-old son and friends of the family, including another child.

In memory, two YouTube clips—one from his long, storied career in the WRC, and a much more recent clip from the X Games. Watch the X Games clip all the way through and you’ll see why McRae is considered one of the top rally drivers ever.

It hasn’t even been two years since the rallying world lost world champ Richard Burns to a brain tumour. The sudden loss of McRae hurts just as much. RIP.

The juicy backstory:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The real story, of course, is slightly less romantic; instead of a Ferrari 275 GTB, it was an old Mercedes 450SEL. Instead of the Formula 1 driver, it was Lelouch himself, along with two others in the car. The sound of Lelouch’s Ferrari was dubbed over the movie for added oomph. And for all that, C’etait un rendezvous is still an astonishing bit of driving cinema. And now you can follow Lelouch’s route as the video plays, via Google Maps.

Fifth Gear tried and failed to recreate the glory of C’etait un rendezvous earlier this year. I almost hesitate to link this because it was a pretty boring segment; morning rush-hour Paris is no time to be making a speed run.

We’re about a third of the way through series 11 of Britain’s second best car show, Fifth Gear, and it’s clear that the producers have taken some of the criticism of the last series to heart. Series 10 was the worst Fifth Gear stretch by a huge margin; the shift in location, the addition of more celebrity puff pieces, the restricted duties of regulars Jason Plato and Tiff Needell, and the addition of new host Tim Lovejoy all combined to make last season very, very difficult to watch. In its continuing attempts to cement a unique identity for itself in the shadow of the colossus that is BBC’s Top Gear, Fifth Gear had thrown away nearly everything that made the show decent and distinctive and replaced it with drivel like “Wreck My Ride,” a segment where they would tear a car apart in a “creative” fashion for no apparent reason.

After a bottoming-out like that, nearly anything would be better, and this series began on a high note: Tim Lovejoy had left to work on other projects. Whether or not that’s a euphemism for “fired for being an uninteresting host who didn’t seem to care much about cars” is almost besides the point: Fifth Gear’s biggest mistake is gone. Unfortunately, the Ace Cafe is still around, but taking the co-host position beside Vicki Butler-Henderson is Tom Ford, the only person to emerge completely unscathed from the poor critical reception the show got. Routinely putting a fun, lighthearted and informative spin on his reviews, Ford was an obvious choice for more exposure, and now he has it.

But problems still linger, and the shock of seeing a decent Fifth Gear episode again has worn off. A couple of things the producers need to fix:

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More evidence that fanboys will be the downfall of civilization: the 2008 Subaru Impreza has broken cover and the response, if you look at the Autoblog comment threads on the subject (at least three posts now), have been near-universally negative. It’s one thing when a company produces something mediocre and everyone praises it to high heaven, but it’s much, much worse when a company produces something mediocre and everyone takes a steaming dump on it:

subaru, you disgust me. you disgust me for killing any soul and character in a previously desirable car. now, your halo car is a fat corolla. bet you feel great approving this peice of shit into production.

To #19 and 23, I couldn’t agree with you two more. Subaru, one of the few independent companies out there that was in a world of its own and and large and loyal fan base, sold out. It looks too feminine, curvy, and fat. It totally lost all that edge to it that just screamed performance when you looked at one.

subaru really broke my heart with this one. and, after the sales come in strong, they will have not a reason in the world to care.

i also like the fact that there is a chick behind the wheel in the photos. it’s suitable because only women will find this fat thing appealing. i can’t see a man, given the choice, coming up to this car and buying it without the shame of looking like a queer. seriously, this thing is just about as masculine as a yaris.

Gee, all that and homophobia as well! The car must look like complete shit, right? Make you projectile vomit the first time you see it from eighty feet away? Make you want to poke your eyes out with rusty forks?

Hey, what do you know? It looks like… a hatchback. Vaguely Mazda3-ish, which was a pretty popular car last I checked. But somehow this is now the ugliest car ever made, a major disappointment to everyone (except stupid women drivers, if some of the Autoblog comments are to be believed). For comparison, a European Ford Focus and a Mazdaspeed 3:

You can easily tell which one is the ugly one out, can’t you?

You can’t tell, you say? You don’t feel particularly pained by any one of the three? Are you sure about that? We may have to revoke your fanboy privileges and welcome you back to the human race.

Meet the Redneck Rollercoaster, an old Chevy Cavalier that’s been heavily modified to move the driver’s controls to an elevated spot over the front bumper. Why? So you can do this:

In the second video the owner explains how the whole contraption works. He’s even mounted the license plate (though I imagine he’d have a hard time convincing the cops it’s road-legal), which is where we learn that the Redneck Rollercoaster is a made-in-Ontario innovation. The car, converted in 2000, has starred in internet videos for a while, but it’s apparently the recent YouTube videos that’s garnered the attention of a Country Music Television film crew. Check out the guy’s new bling!

Autoblog posts its blacklist of things that should disappear in 2007. The Camry Solara gets singled out for extremely dubious praise, a car that stands out by being blander than most everything else on the road today. But particularly interesting—and heartening—is this blackballed item:

Cheap gas.
This borders on heresy for an automotive blog, but gas is too cheap. Who among us wouldn’t love to give up sitting in gridlock? You could drive for pleasure. Of course, this would have to go hand in hand with massive improvements to public transportation. Adding additional taxes on to fuel to fund light-rail improvements, offer incentives for developing biofuels and sustainable sources of energy would be wonderful and worth it. Pay now or pay later – and if we’re going to have to pay anyway, we may as well attempt to be less beholden to energy sources from unstable regions of the world.

Yes, that’s right—an automotive blog is saying there should be better public transit and more expensive gas. This is, I think, the first time someone else has articulated the way I feel about cars: in a perfect world, we’d only ever use them as track day speedsters and back-road cruisers. Leave the commuting to public transit systems, which are far more efficient at the task of carrying people around in the city. Though I love cars and would love one day to drive them on a track or in a rallycross, I have never understood the strident defence of a driver’s right to sit in their car, idling on a congested freeway, for an hour or more to get to work.

As for the relatively enlightened stance on alternative fuels, that’s not so much a surprise—with vehicles like the Tesla Roadster promising a more green-friendly way to feed your speed addiction, people are finally realizing that powersliding and fuel economy don’t necessarily have to be at odds with one another.

Fifth Gear, now in its tenth season, is a television show aired in the UK about cars. As a distant cousin and direct competitor to Top Gear, Fifth Gear has always had a bit of difficulty scurrying out from underneath the shadow of the BBC goliath. Presenters Tiff Needell and Vicki Butler-Henderson were exiles from Top Gear’s previous incarnation, and though it doesn’t have the same boys-in-the-bar feel and outrageous road tests of the new Top Gear, Fifth Gear has always managed to set itself somewhat apart by taking the best aspects of the old Top Gear. The show’s more serious streak and racing pedigree meant it could put together more authoritative road tests without giving in to the faster-bigger-more mentality of Top Gear.

In recent years, the show seemed to be getting better; though the move to a full-hour format two years ago had some stumbles, Fifth Gear’s ninth season was one of its best yet. The magic formula of entertaining presenters and informative car reviews was finally coming together. Compared to the most recent season of Top Gear, which had indulged a bit too much in painfully scripted “wacky hijinks,” it even seemed that Fifth Gear might be able to compete on its own terms if it just continued to hammer away and continue to work on the formula: stop trying to get the presenters to enter race series, stop forcing the presenters to engage in witty banter around the conference table, and keep putting Tom Ford in as many cars as you can.

Well, the tenth season of Fifth Gear started last week. The verdict: it’s all gone horribly, dismally wrong.

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Autoweek pit five vastly different cars against each other in a fuel economy shootout. For the most part, the vehicles did what the EPA numbers expected them to; and the “shocking development” was that the Prius, with a rated 51 mpg highway consumption rating, fell short of the Jetta TDI (42 mpg EPA highway) by a full 8 mpg—42 to the Jetta’s 50. But that’s not all that shocking if you’ve paid any attention whatsoever to automobile developments on the other side of the pond; diesels are far more prevalent in Europe and the hybrid-diesel comparison has been performed a number of times, with the diesels almost always coming out on top. Also recall that it was VW—who have invested heavily in diesel technologies and are the only brand to have a substantial lineup of diesel cars in North America—that built a diesel-fueled prototype that did 264 mpg, the equivalent of 0.89L/100km. Indeed, the real worth of hybrid technology in general has been in doubt for a while, and though it will continue to improve as more people buy them, it’s quite obvious that hybrids aren’t the silver bullet when it comes to solving the looming hydrocarbon crisis.

But back to the Autoweek story. The really shocking development to me wasn’t the Jetta’s supremacy; it was the performance of some of the other cars in the shootout. The two cars that finished last in the shootout? The Jeep Commander (330 hp) and the Chevrolet Corvette (400 hp). But while the Commander did a fairly dismal 17 mpg, the Corvette managed to get 27.2 miles to the gallon despite running on all eight cylinders the whole time (the Hemi in the Jeep has a multiple displacement system that can shut off half of the cylinders at cruising speed). That’s only 6 mpg off the Honda Accord Hybrid, the fifth car tested in the shootout. How did they achieve 27 mpg? They drove at highway speeds while in sixth gear, leaving the engine to hum along at under 2000 rpm.

Not that sports cars are terribly fuel efficient either, but at least it makes me feel a lot better about watching Top Gear.