Exclusive: read an extract from the newest Top Gear book, 'Nought to Sixty'

Top Gear – Nought To Sixty is a race through almost half a century of motoring mayhem from epic challenges like building home-made stretch limos, bungee jumping a Rover 114 or destroying a Toyota Hilux to all the adventure of the legendary road trips.

To celebrate the book's release, here's an exclusive extract remembering the time Jeremy, James and Richard built amphibious cars...

If any nation was ever going to make the amphibious car happen, surely it had to be Britain. With a proud seafaring history and thousands of miles of coastline, rivers, lakes and canals at our disposal, just imagine the freedom a true aquatic runabout would afford the adventurous driver-sailor.

Yet previous attempts to create a water-going car had never really captured this country’s imagination. Clearly what Britain needed was a pioneering amphibious car to win hearts and minds, to prove that a vehicle capable of taming both tarmac and water wasn’t just technically possible, but truly desirable.

What Britain ended up with was a grotty, beige, old Triumph Herald with a flimsy mast; a VW campervan cosplaying as a canal barge; and a Toyota Hilux pick-up fitted with an outboard motor that... actually mostly sort of worked in the water, right up until the moment it decided to catastrophically capsize.

There were, as Jeremy, James and Richard rapidly discovered, two significant issues with creating an amphibious car. Firstly, propulsion. James opted for good, old-fashioned wind power, reasoning that if it was good enough for Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and Captain Jack Sparrow, it was good enough for a small lake in Staffordshire.

And there are, no question, many advantages to wind power. It’s clean, it’s green and it doesn’t require complicated industrial hardware to harness. There are, however, also several disadvantages to wind power, particularly when attempting to apply it to a car. One is that you need a very tall mast, which is fine when tackling the open water, but not so fine when tackling low railway bridges. Another is that, if the wind isn’t blowing, or is blowing in the wrong direction, you basically have no control over where you’re going, and will inevitably end up several miles off course in a thicket of reeds.

Propulsion-wise, Richard opted to hook up his VW’s diesel engine to a rear-mounted propeller, which seemed vaguely promising until it snapped in half on the jetty before even entering the water. Jeremy’s outboard thus appeared the most sensible power solution, or at least it would have been if he’d used a lightweight 2bhp motor as suggested, rather than upgrading to an utterly unnecessary 225bhp behemoth.

The second issue with amphibious cars? Watertightness. Despite the addition of a great deal of foam and welding, all three craft suffered the small issue of water ingress, followed by the rather bigger issue of ‘calamitous sinking’.

Despite the amphibious cars’ first outing ending in what even the most generous onlooker would describe as an unqualified disaster, Top Gear wasn’t done with water-cars just yet. A couple of years later, the presenters were ordered to refine their amphibious car concepts and report to Dover, from where they would attempt to cross the English Channel... to France, which, for the non-geographers out there, is a whole other country. On the other side of a 22-mile stretch of water. Which just so happens to also be the busiest shipping lane in the world.

The challenge went... actually somewhat better than anyone expected, despite the fact that James and Richard’s ‘upgraded’ craft sank many, many times, necessitating the involvement of the coastguard, maritime rescue and the sea police. Eventually ditching the Herald and Dampervan, all three presenters boarded Jeremy’s Nissank in an attempt to beat Richard Branson’s record for the fastest crossing of the Channel by amphibious car. This they... totally failed to do, although they did, somehow, make it to France without sinking, being flattened by a supertanker or causing an international diplomatic incident.

Did these pioneering exploits usher in a glorious new era of aquatic British motoring? They did not. Was this, all things considered, for the best? Yes, it was.

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