The third episode of Top Gear Series 29 was on last night, throughout this new series, all of the ‘studio’ segments were recorded over a few days in September on the actual runway at Dunsfold and guests drove their own cars in, which brings a nice dynamic to the show. Last week, the Stig didn’t make an appearance and this week he was back. This episode visits the subject of hire cars, this has been covered by Top Gear before, when Jeremy Clarkson drove a Toyota Corolla in New Zealand in a race against James May in a sailing boat. Top Gear USA also covered this subject, when they had three different classes of hire cars and had to drive through a dessert, all three cars were pretty much ruined at the end.
Back to this episode, which had Chris, Paddy and Freddie visit Cyprus back in February of this year and they had to rent a car for two days with a budget of €30. Chris had a Kia Picanto, Paddy had a Ford Focus CC, which he boasted was designed by Pininfarina and Freddie had a Mk1 Suzuki Jimny.
The trio had a number of challenges, including using the cars as the power for water skiing but first up was the task of completing a fast lap, whilst having traffic coming the other way and heaters in the car with a temperature of 40 degrees. Paddy wins this challenge, by a small margin.
The next challenge gets a bit less related to cars, they drive to a reservoir and along the way the cars take quite a battering. Each of them is tasked to see how fast their cars can pull them using a drum of cable attached to the driving axle of the car.
Mid way through the episode, Paddy and Chris hit the track to see what type of car is the best family vehicle, if money was no object at all. Chris, who loves estate cars chose the brand new Audi RS6 and Paddy came with the
Back to the hire car challenge, they then head to a ski resort and race down the slope, while each car has some kind of ‘protection’ fitted.
Verdict
Another entertaining episode, a bit less about the cars as much and more larking about this week, which can be seen as a good or bad thing. But it leaves us looking forward to the next episode.
Check out our review of Episode 1 here
Check out our review of Episode 2 here
Top Gear is on BBC One on Sunday at 8pm and on BBC iPlayer. Next episode is this week.
