TG TV series 24: your ultimate preview

It might have been the sight of a London taxi mooching through the wilds of Kazakhstan, or maybe it was the curious image of a Lamborghini Huracán pinned down a ski slope at crazy speed - with a bloke who used to be called Joey behind the wheel. But wobbling a clapped-out Maserati 222 into Havana's Revolution Square beat them both as a personal reminder of the sheer scope of films we've made for this new series of Top Gear.

That's what I love about working for TG - the stupefying variety of locations and vehicles, places and people. From simple(ish) power tests at our Dunsfold test track to scrabbling up rock faces in the California desert, every day is an adventure, and at the centre of each insane idea there is at least one motor car we want to understand and, most of the time, celebrate. I still can't quite believe the line-up of metal you'll get to see over the seven weeks - it's remarkable.

I hope you have as much fun watching the show as we did making it.

Once upon a time, convertible supercars were quite literally fair-weather friends: suitable only for driving on the one day of the year when it was dry and warm, but not so warm as to melt the vital structural glue holding the suspension to the other bits of suspension. For the rest of the cold, rainy, icy, or otherwise less-than-entirely-clement year, they were broadly useless.

But not nowadays, according to Matt and Chris. The modern crop of cabriolet supercars, they reckon, are a joy to use all year round, no matter the weather.

To test this theory, Harris and LeBlanc were each told to choose a truly fine modern example of an all-season convertible supercar – Matt, the shrinking wallflower that is the Lamborghini Huracán; Chris, the modestly powered Porsche 911 Turbo cabrio – for a roadtrip across America’s Wild West. A roadtrip incorporating broiling desert, snowy mountains and everything in between. Which, in the case of America’s Wild West, basically means “slightly less broiling desert” and “slightly less snowy mountains”.

Pay close attention. A new season sees a new feature installed at the TG test track, and it’s the must-have accessory all the kids are talking about: a portal to a parallel dimension. Installed just to the left of Hammerhead, and creatively named “Left At Hammerhead”, it works by, um, apparently something to do with quantum states, and a lot of cooling fans.

Accordingly, it fell to Matt LeBlanc and the rather suave new Aston Martin DB11 to test Left At Hammerhead for the first time. Where might it lead? The outer reaches of Neptune? Paris in the Roaring Twenties? Or the mountain roads of Montenegro, to do battle with Chris Harris in a very rapid Mercedes? If you hadn’t guessed by the picture above, it was the Montenegro thing.

Who’s Top Gear’s fastest driver? Well, that’s clearly Stig, a machine that simply doesn’t understand the meaning of the word “defeat”. Or the word “spoon”. Or any words at all, now we come to think of it.

But who’s Top Gear’s second-fastest driver? According to pro racer Chris Harris, it’s pro racer Chris Harris. And according to pro racer Sabine Schmitz, it’s pro racer Sabine Schmitz. To settle this dispute, a head-to-head race was needed. Trouble was, Harris and Sab couldn’t decide on where to race. Or what cars to race. With Sab and Chris locked in stalemate, the office chose the race for them, and the office went big. The King Of The Hammers. Simply to finish, Schmitz and Harris would have to survive the most fearsome of challenges: giant boulder fields, vertigo-inducing drops and an evening in the desert with team managers EJ and MLB.

Two major crises face humanity today. The first crisis is the continued presence on our roads of the SsangYong Rodius, not only the most hideous vehicle ever created, but arguably the most hideous thing ever created, full stop. SsangYong might not be building the grotesque original any more, but there are many Rodiuses still out there, trundling along our motorways, refusing to die, causing mortal damage to eyes as they go.

The second issue is the exorbitant cost of luxury yachting. Top Gear did several minutes of research into this, and it turns out buying yourself a boat to mix it up with Monaco’s finest can cost literally millions of pounds, and then there’s the cost of crew, fuel and chandelier polish. Honestly, it’s almost as if the superyacht elite don’t want normal people to join in.

Thankfully Rory Reid’s come up with a plan to solve both these problems in one fell swoop. A slightly soggy fell swoop, permeated with the unmistakable stench of fibreglass.

If you’re in the market for a rear-engined, rear-wheel-drive sports car, you’re pretty much limited to one of two options: the legendary Porsche 911, or the very slightly less legendary Renault Twingo GT.

Now, if you’re intent on, say, smashing your personal best around the Nürburgring, you’re more likely to opt for the former: the Twingo, after all, packs barely 100 horsepower and tops out at the sort of speed likely to see traffic officers give you a sympathetic wince rather than a ticket.

But if, on the other hand, you’re faced with a giant arcade-game maze constructed of shipping containers, the wee Renault might be just the compact, nippy performance car you need. Rory Reid went all 16-bit to discover if the Twingo can out-game its rivals from Smart and VW.

Chris Harris and Italian supercar vendor Ferrari have, over the years, enjoyed many a spirited exchange. Rather in the same way that North and South Korea have, over the years, enjoyed many a spirited exchange. We’ll leave you to decide for yourself whether Harris or Ferrari represent the despotic totalitarian state in this analogy.

But thankfully Harris and those heart-on-their-sleeves Italians seem to have patched things up, as Ferrari kindly invited him to drive its most exclusivest, exotic creation: the LaFerrari-based, jaw-dropping FXXK. Nothing says “let’s be friends” like 1,050bhp of track-only hypercar.

Spending eighty-eight thousand pounds on a posh family SUV has never been easier, with Audi, Porsche, Land Rover and pretty much every other mainstream manufacturer delighted to relieve you of your cash in exchange for something imposing and mostly off-road.

But who wants to be mainstream? If you wish to spend £88,000 on an imposing SUV that isn’t an Audi, or a Range Rover, or a Porsche, or indeed a make you’ve ever heard of, Matt LeBlanc reckons he has the answer. It’s called the Shaman, it comes from Russia, and it has eight wheels, so is therefore mathematically twice as good as the disappointingly four-wheeled offerings from Europe’s so-called “elite”.

However, as Matt discovers in the course of a very thorough Isle of Man road test, the Shaman, while basically perfect in almost every regard, does come with one inconvenient downside: the necessity of rescuing imperilled locals. Some of them proved a mite deficient in the clothing department.

Here’s a sensible, grown-up consumer question: what’s the most reliable new car on the market?

According to our presenters, it may be a sensible, grown-up question, but it’s also one that makes no sense. New cars, argue Matt, Chris and Rory, can’t be reliable. They’re new. It’s like saying a just-born baby is “well-educated”. Sure, a new car might have the potential for reliability, but it’s not yet proved it.

No, according to our intrepid threesome, the only way to truly prove reliability is over the course of lots, and lots, and lots of miles. Thankfully, if you delve the very filthiest corners of the classifieds – the pages just before you get to the adverts offering kittens by the kilo – it’s possible to find used cars with quite ludicrous mileage. Cars that, by definition, must be the most reliable on the planet, right?

And so it came to pass that Matt, Chris and Rory were each instructed to buy a car with at least 480,000 miles on the clock – the equivalent, space-fans, of literally driving to the Moon and back – and sent to wildest Kazakhstan to prove the reliability of their mega-mile machines. With a trip to a secretive city full of the stuff that has actually been to the Moon and back...

It’s 40 years since the first Volkswagen Golf GTI landed on British shores, wielding a fearsome 110 horsepower and a rather natty gearknob. Since then, hot hatches have… well, they’ve got a whole lot faster. And more powerful. And more expensive. Enter, as evidence, the new Golf Clubsport S: three hundred horsepower and £34,000 of decidedly premium hot hatch.

Sure, it has a natty gearknob, but it also has no rear seats, which, on a per seat basis, surely makes it one of the worst-value hot hatches ever. But what if you don’t think of the Clubsport S as a hot hatch, but rather a Nürburgring-munching two-seat supercar in disguise? Rory Reid assembled the vital ingredients: a Clubsport S, a Nürburgring and a Sabine. Schnell, schnell, kartoffelkopf, etc.

As Planet Car becomes ever more homogenised, the roads of every continent an indistinguishable mulch of beige Toyotas and Hyundais and further Toyotas, one nation stands alone as a beacon of otherness: Cuba. Since the Sixties, the sun-drenched Caribbean island has existed as a motoring time capsule, its inhabitants surviving on a diet of those classic American barges that come with their own Instagram filter, interspersed with the odd Soviet or Chinese snotter.

But with Cuba’s garage doors now opening to the world for the first time in half a century, Chris and Rory felt it their duty to show the Cubans exactly what they’ve been missing out on, car-wise. So with a budget of £5,000, they each purchased a sports car they felt would tickle the Cuban fancy, then headed off for a proper roadtrip. Their starting spot? The infamous Bay of Pigs, a location curiously lacking in four-legged ovine ungulates.

We know the new Alfa Romeo Giulia is a very fine car, with no less an authority than popular motor-car periodical BBC Top Gear magazine recently naming the 503bhp super-saloon its car of the year. But Chris Harris apparently doesn’t trust the opinion of popular motor-car periodical BBC Top Gear magazine, and wanted to discover for himself whether the Giulia was all it’s cracked up to be. And find out whether it could out-drift a BMW M3.

Rory, on the other hand, wished to know whether Chris could drift the Giulia through a small hole in a very solid-looking wall. Much was learned that day, particularly regarding the small print of damage waiver forms.