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As Top Gear finished its much-delayed run a few weeks ago, the cheery continuity announcer said that the show would be back in the summer. Well, I'm sorry, love, but it won't be. Not unless someone from the Greenwich Observatory suddenly decides that we need a new month between May and June.

The fact is that it takes four months to film enough material for a run of Top Gear. And then another couple of months to turn the miles of tape we generate into something you might actually want to watch. So trust me on this, no one has a clue when Top Gear will be back.

But assuming we do come back to BBC2 at some point in the future - October, if we're lucky - our problems will be far from over. Because as I write, no one has much of a clue what the programme should look like. I'd therefore like your help.

Here's the problem. When Richard Hammond went upside down last September, we had pretty much finished filming everything we needed for a nine-week run leading up to Christmas.

Oh, there were a few loose ends to finish off: the limos, for instance, had been bought and converted, but not tested at the track nor used to deliver celebrities to a glittering gala do. Then came the accident, the postponement and the news that only six programmes could be shoehorned into the slot we eventually used in January and February.

We had material for nine shows. But only six to show it. So what to leave in? What to leave out? Economics won the day.

It is hugely expensive to make triple-header events like the America run, the farming story and the limousine test. And it's fairly cheap to drive a manufacturer's test car round some corners on a quiet country road or on our track.

So if we were going to ditch anything, it'd be the cheaper stuff: the road tests. And if we were going to show anything, it'd be the big films featuring James, Richard and me.

The ones that need three crews, a few days on location and countless late nights at the edit. As a result, and quite by accident, the series that's just finished was full of us three cocking about, and almost completely devoid of anything you might fairly call 'a road test'.

You had us growing petrol, getting stuck in Fulham, being hounded out of Alabama and resurfacing roads. And about two seconds of a Porsche going round corners in Lincolnshire.