Transmission – BBC Top Gear Australia

Trying to find a genuine, immaculate Phase III GTHO is not easy. Trying to find one that the owner would let us drive was another challenge altogether.
Fortunately, we found one such owner and we got to do the story.
There was a lot of discussion about using a replica. After all, on the tele, you’d never know.
We’d also feel (slightly) less bad about things if the worst had happened and we bent it.
Well, luckily we didn’t bend it, because it was the real deal.

The owners were there every step of the way on the shoot.
A few tricks were used to look after the car as much as possible, but still make it look exciting.
We wet a corner of the track at Oran Park for the sideways stuff. That way there’s less stress on the tyres and the rest of the driveline when going sideways.
Steve Pizzati spun it once as he got braver with each pass, but the cameras weren’t rolling, so we got him to do it again. And, how’s this for precision, he spun in exactly the same spot!
By this time the owners were getting understandably fidgety so we headed to Bathurst.
We tried to hire the whole circuit so we could drive the car at speed. But we were told by Bathurst Council it would cost the equivalent of the debt of a small country to rent for the day, so we gave that a miss and drove at the posted 60km/h limit instead.
We notified the police and other authorities we were coming and, for once, we wish we saw the law (we were expecting the local highway patrol would come up for a look, but they left us alone). The number of people who hoon dangerously around Mt Panorama is ridiculous. We nearly got cleaned up several times.
Pizzati found the GTHO was scary enough to drive at normal speeds. The tyres squealed in every corner even though he was nursing it seemingly at walking pace.
Normally Pizzati doesn’t mind going up and down the road and making u-turns so the crew can get several takes of each shot. But without power steering, it started to get draining.
Pizzati was genuinely exhausted at the end of each day.
He reckons he wouldn’t do an hour around Bathurst, let alone the six and a bit that Allan Moffat did in 1971 to win the race.

For the Mole, though, the most telling thing about this story is how the GTHO compares on a Stig lap to a bog standard Ford Falcon or Holden Commodore. Won’t spoil the surprise…

Meanwhile, Warren Brown and James Morrison lapped it up in luxury testing the gadgets on the Mercedes S Class and Lexus LS600 hybrid. Both guys try to outdo each other in the technology race.

James figures out the owner’s manual of the Lexus is 600 pages thick. Without a lie, he took it to bed to read the night before the shoot. He hasn’t stopped regurgitating odd facts about the car since.

The pit crew challenge (presenters versus Triple 8 racing in a tyre change) was very real and done in one take. Our guys nearly cross-threaded one of the race car’s wheel hubs, but luckily didn’t. By the way, it’s the Bathurst winning car from last year and a car that Craig Lowndes drove this year until he got his new car. It’s not a mock up.

The Cayenne versus horse race is fair dinkum too. The start and the last few seconds of footage are of the original race, and the stuff in between was filmed after the race, which is why there’s camera car dust in front of Warren. He was going much faster in the real deal.

We’ll let you in on a few more surprises in the blog after the show. Keep your questions coming.