Tell us your motoring horror stories

In our bumper, shiny 300th issue of Top Gear magazine, we owned up to a few motoring disasters that have befallen the TG team over the years. Today, you’ll no doubt have realised, is Halloween, which means tenuous-motoring-horror-show-tie-in.

One anecdote concerned a journey from hell itself. Well, a nightmare journey to drive the wild Dodge Demon in America. “We made it to Newark,” explains TG mag’s Ollie Marriage, “where everything went wrong.

“Our short hop to Indianapolis was first delayed, and then cancelled. The next flight was oversubscribed.” Another flight via Washington was a painful expedition through a mass of people on a small plane managed by a terrifying human. 

Then to DC, where “there was no hotel, not a single room free,” which necessitated a 45-minute trip back to the airport where Ollie and Rowan Horncastle spent the night sleeping on the terminal floor. The journey back to the UK was even longer…

Or the time former TG staffer Piers Ward forgot to take a garaged Chevy Corvette out of gear before starting it, and took his foot off the clutch while still in first. It careered into a roller shutter ahead. All this before a highly important shoot. “Brain went into meltdown”, he recalled, “in one of those awful slow-motion moments of inevitability…

“We continued to roll towards the door. Crunch. Impact speed of 3–4mph, but enough to pop the car’s bumper out of line and banana the garage door.” Ouchy.

Then there was the time TG’s Paul Horrell accidentally reversed a brand new Nissan GT-R into the nose of a brand new Audi RS6 on a panning shot. “Both were due to be shown for the first time to the British public in the Supercar Run at the following weekend’s Goodwood Festival of Speed,” he said.

Oh, and there was that thing with the highly expensive one-off supercar Mazda concept thingy – something called a Furai, we think – but that’s a whole other story…

So, considering it’s Halloween, we want to hear your tales of motoring hell. Dive into the comments below and tell us your worst.