The Show - Production Notes - Car vs Boat
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Production notes
McLaren SLR vs boat
Most supercars are brittle things. When one turns up for a test on the Top Gear track, the gear box generally explodes on the second lap and it goes home with bald tyres and cooked brakes.
Not so the Mercedes McLaren SLR. This masterpiece of British engineering and German build quality just kept going and going.
So we decided to set it a real challenge. Could Jeremy drive an SLR from Heathrow airport in London to the centre of downtown Oslo, Norway, faster than Richard and James could make it by plane, ferry and powerboat? There was only one way to find out.
Originally, we'd decided to make this more of a real-world test and had settled on using a Vauxhall Astra. But then we realised Jeremy would run out of things to say about it before he'd made it out of Heathrow car park. The boys and girls at McLaren came to our aid at very short notice, and the rest is history.
Because we knew Jeremy had almost 24 hours of driving ahead of him, we told him to get an early night before the race. But, because he's really seven years old, Jeremy was far too excited to get any sleep.
The scariest moment during the shoot came when Richard and James' powerboat started to sink and the support boat got a puncture. The water was so cold they would have frozen to death in three minutes if they'd gone overboard. James has understandably described this as "one of the low points of [his] whole existence". Just to complete the misery, Richard was sick on him.
The McLaren didn't miss a beat during the whole journey. Admittedly, it does have a bit of a thirst for the super-unleaded, but if we had to cross a continent in a day we know which supercar we'd choose.
We only had the budget to film one location from a helicopter, but we had a seriously hard time choosing between the many amazing sights along our route. In the end, we opted for the Oresund bridge that connects Denmark and Sweden, but the roads along the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands and the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark came a close second and third. If you ever get a chance to drive to either, we suggest you do - just remember to take a CD of stirring orchestral music with you.
© MMIX