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.

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.

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.

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:

Celebrities. I don’t live in the UK so I can’t tell if the celebs they’ve had on the show so far are big audience draws or not, but if you must have them on, at least give them more interesting things to do than try out for their motorcycling license. Better yet, kick ‘em off the show entirely. We don’t need to see Tobey Maguire awkwardly answer soft questions about cars, and we don’t need to see two actors chat with Butler-Henderson in the Ace Cafe parking lot about who the hell knows because I fast forwarded through the segment.

Driven to Destruction. The show apparently has to have a regular segment in there somewhere, and while I generally agree that regular segments give viewers something to look forward to every week, they’re also dangerous if they turn out to be boring. The Driven to Destruction segment is just that: boring. No one really cares how long you can drive a car in reverse until the engine boils over (belated spoiler alert!). It also highlights Fifth Gear’s reliance on a small cast of occasional experts, like Paul The Mechanic. You may remember him from such segments as “let’s destroy an old Mercedes” from two series ago, and a bunch of segments last year.

More reviews, less fluff. While it’s fun to see Tiff Needell do a four-wheel drift in the dirt in a Bentley Continental convertible with two hot models in the back seat, it’s a quick thrill and not much more. It’s a shame, given that Needell is the most consistently entertaining driver on the British car shows, that he’s not given more amazing cars to pound on. The latest segment, where he tosses two hot hatches around the track with two of the other presenters in tow demonstrates that you can put Needell in pretty much anything and he’ll give you good video. Ford made his bread and butter on reviews too, both for Fifth Gear and as a contributing editor for Top Gear Magazine. Toss him some more of those as well. And while Plato’s schedule must be busy, what with his racing career and all, it’d be better to see him give a reasoned opinion on a fast car than to ask him to hit 200mph on the Autobahn just because. And speaking of which…

Stop with the records. Whenever Fifth Gear puts on a challenge—can we set the land speed record for driving backwards, or can we break 200mph in an A1 Grand Prix car—the results almost always end in failure. Actually, a lot of segments end in failure—Plato never did make 200mph on the Autobahn, and Needell managed to bust up a Koenigsegg a couple of years back too, leaving us with an incomplete track review and a load of disappointment. And then there are the just-plain-silly records like “fastest fully-seated MPV.” It’s funny watching seven seniors complain they have to go to the potty during a speed record attempt, but it’s only funny once, and then you’ve got four more minutes of footage to get through while you think “okay, novelty’s worn out already, I no longer care about this.”

The problem with Fifth Gear is it’s never truly embraced a possible life as a companion and counterpoint to Top Gear’s Three Stooges-like shenanigans. Considering that the last Top Gear season was especially brutal with the “how hard can it be?” comedy pratfall segments, you’d think the producers of Fifth Gear would run in the opposite direction and attempt to put together a slick, streamlined car show that aimed to entertain but also inform—the cooler, more serious younger brother, if you will. Certainly Fifth Gear has bragged in the past about its roster of presenters all having bona-fide racing credentials (though of course that’s no longer the case with Ford and Jonny Smith on board). And as Top Gear’s core audience becomes increasingly frustrated with the dog-and-pony-show antics, there’s a real opening for Fifth Gear to exploit. But so long as they continue to charm with the celebs and the dumb segments, they’ll miss the mark, and who knows how long that opening will be there—you can’t count on the BBC mothership to screw up for very long.

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.

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!

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.

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.

New presenter Tim Lovejoy was responsible for the single least interesting segment from last year, driving around with a rock band in a Mini. This episode, he had nothing of worth to contribute except the oh-so-controversial statement that Al Gore is not a tree-hugging hippie. The scenes shot in the cafe—a bizarre and unnecessary change of scenery—were painful to watch, both because of Lovejoy and because of the apparent lobotomy given to co-host Vicki Butler-Henderson.

The filmed segments were, for the most part, asinine; racing a Mini against a radio-controlled car and an Evo against a stunt plane might be fun for the cameramen, but tell us next to nothing about either car and are essentially worthless even as eye candy. Then you have Tom Ford at Creamfields displaying a complete lack of embarassment when trying to DJ in a car. Normally Tom Ford can make fun of himself as well as anyone, but here it came off as desperate. Besides which, what was the point? The whole thing had barely anything to do with cars. Amazingly, the best part of the episode was Jon Bentley’s segment on a self-driving Volkswagen Golf. And not to knock Jon Bentley, as I think he’s done a pretty good job over the years, but this was the same guy that everyone hated two years ago because his segments were boring and dull. But then, when you’re up against a giant piece of construction equipment crushing a car, watching paint becomes more intellectually stimulating.

More glaring were the omissions. Tiff Needell was talked about more than he was actually on screen, and Jason Plato was nowhere to be found (though this may have to do with his chase for the BTCC championship—a reminder that some of the people on Fifth Gear still have racing credentials, i.e. not Tim Lovejoy). The professional quality of the between-segments editing has disappeared as well, leaving the interstitial bits feeling like a daytime talk show instead of a slickly produced show about cars.

Many things about the show’s new incarnation speaks to a complete lack of confidence in the material. The numerous mentions of Needell’s apparent god-like stature; the sheer amount of interstitial banter and the clumsiness with which Lovejoy and Butler-Henderson executed it; the continual promotion and hype about segments you were going to see in a couple of minutes. All that was missing was the five-minute segment about why Top Gear sucks to fill yet more time. It’s as if the producers had to convince both the audience and themselves that the show was worth watching. Here’s a hint: try putting together forty-four minutes of material that doesn’t make me want to retch. If you can’t do that, just replay the ninth season over again; you can’t possibly lose more viewers than you would if you continue to put up new episodes like this.

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.