TG TV s25: Matt, Chris and Rory answer YOUR questions!

Episode one of brand-new Top Gear telly returns to your screens this Sunday, and as a special treat, we got our three hosts together to answer a few questions previewing the new series.

A question from James Baker via TopGear.com: which car do the hosts most regret buying, and which car do they most regret selling?

Matt LeBlanc: I had a ‘84 or ‘85 Audi 5000. I guess I regret buying that one. I don’t regret selling it. The one I regret selling? Well, I had a 1970 Pantera, and a 360 Modena.

Chris Harris: For me it was a 106 XSI Peugeot which had clearly been written off. But I still wrote the cheque for some reason, then found out hours later it had been written off.

And in 2007 I sold one of 12 993 GT2s for a sum of money that is now a million pounds less than what’s it’s worth today.

Rory Reid: The car that I miss the most is the Vauxhall Astra GTE 16v. I remember buying that car, thinking ‘yes, this is like my first proper fast car’. And then I remember hooning down the road thinking ‘god this thing’s quick’. I had to get on the brakes pretty quickly. The brakes didn’t work. I went straight across a junction, saw a bus coming towards me on one side, car coming on that side, I went straight through.

At that moment I realised: I regretted buying it.

The car I kind of regret selling the most is… probably the same car. They don’t make ‘em like they used to. These hot hatches are so complicated nowadays, there’s something to be said for this older generation of hot hatch which are all stripped down and simple…

MLB: But the brakes work nowadays!

And Hanik Kotecha via TG.com asked: it’s the end of the world in an hour’s time. You’re going to spend your final hour going for a drive. What car, and what road?

CH: OK. It would be about February, because I know that the apocalypse is going to happen in winter. I would go to Norway, where there are loads of frozen lakes. I’ll have a 911 rally car from the mid 70s, with studded tyres, and I’m just going to go round and round and round until it all gets really red and hot.

MLB: I got one. There’s a place not too far from my house in California called the Snake. It’s part of Mulholland Highway just north of northern Malibu, it’s really twisty and you get all the ‘lurkers’ out there-

CH: Lurker means something quite different over here…

MLB: We probably get a few of them too! No, I would probably take my GT2 RS and go fang up that road.

RR: It’s a tough one. I would probably have to pick the car that is the best all-rounder ever, a Range Rover. I’d probably have the SVAutobiography, with a big, 5.0-litre supercharged V8 in it. And I’d just go anywhere. Anywhere I damn well want because that’s where the car goes, up mountains-

MLB: You’d go down the high street and you know it!

Here’s what Matt had to say about series 25’s highlights…

MLB: We did a film in Northern California that was really fun, we drove some pretty radical off-road machines. Sri Lanka was great, not very fast but still pretty fun. Utah, the V8s, was amazing, that was pretty special. Spain was great. Guildford was great!

To be quite honest, we probably had the most laughs in Guildford. That’s where our home track is, that’s where everybody’s most comfortable to push the limits. There’s no walls to hit… we had the most fun there.

…and here’s Matt and Chris on being able to properly drive a car…

CH: This show is about driving cars. If you can’t drive the cars properly, I’m not sure you can actually do your job. I’ve always felt that if you found out that Jamie Oliver couldn’t boil an egg, you wouldn’t believe his cookery show.

MLB: When I first joined the show, I thought ‘yeah I can drive good enough’, and pretend I’m a fast driver on TV. You know, the camera adds a few skill points, just as it adds a few pounds!

You get in the car, and what you don’t realise is you’ve got to deliver all this information… at a 100mph+ going down a racetrack. So I went out and did some laps, came in and said ‘how was that?’, and they said ‘you didn’t say anything. You didn’t say one word.’

What was it like for Chris and Rory to work with Joey from Friends?

CH: I spent the majority of the early Nineties semi-inebriated lying on the sofa watching him, so then to suddenly find yourself working alongside side, sharing jokes with him, being the butt of his practical jokes, and all the other stuff, is brilliant.

I drove through Hazelmere town centre in a bright orange tractor, and there are people thinking ‘is that Joey from Friends?’

As we were leaving them behind, it would dawn on them who it was, and they’d shout really badly ‘how you doin’ at the tractor. The whole thing is totally surreal.

RR: I would say he’s not as Hollywood as you think. In the first series I was reviewing the Ford Focus RS, and Matt texted me, saying ‘you really liked that car didn’t you?’. I said ‘yeah’.

So he asks ‘should I buy it?’ and I said ‘yeah’. And then he went out and bought one. And then I realised I just told Joey from Friends to buy a Ford Focus. A little blue hatchback, on my recommendation. And then you start to think ‘what if it’s s***?’ Thankfully he loved it.

Don’t forget, all new TG TV kicks off this Sunday at 8pm on BBC Two and BBC Two HD in the UK. For our full season preview, click here