A translator is present, but is not necessary, as the rules just laid out by the burly police officer were clear, fair, and well within my understanding of the internationally recognized hand gestures. NO BURNOUTS. NO SPEEDING VIOLATIONS.’ Unfortunately, these rules are ignored and immediately broken.
The plan (in the loosest sense of the word) was to have a simple but jovial parade from the circuit to the center of Most. Apparently, much to the chagrin of the local Czech Law Enforcement, the truckers accompanying us did not get the memo. They go completely Truckhanadrifting around every roundabout, leaving 12-inch-wide tire tracks after 200-foot rolling-start burnouts, and forgetting everything she’s ever been told about something like “braking distances.”
Drifting trucks on the public road
Well, I can imagine that you’ve never witnessed a race truck with six locked wheels almost crashing into the back of a Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica, but believe me: that’s a scary situation. Which you can now watch on TikTok thanks to an overenthusiastic teenager.
Now a six ton love kiss would have raised eyebrows in the safe environment of the beautiful track we’ve been scrubbing at for the past two days, but we’re – I can’t believe I’m writing this – just out on the street.
And not even on closed streets. No, streets with traffic, and several thousand exuberant people along them; complete with babies in prams and grannies behind walkers. Aside from the potential gigantic insurance claims, it’s fantastic. And unexpected.
It’s a special day in more ways than one
Certainly because TopGears involvement in all this came about through factors such as chance, luck and language barriers that can only be partially bridged. Because well, at the beginning of this year I sent an email to a rather anonymous mailbox, asking if we could perhaps use a relatively unknown circuit in the Czech Republic for our annual Top Gear SpeedWeek.
And how could I have known that our preferred dates exactly coincided with the 30th anniversary of the Czech Truck Prix? Which, it turns out, is pretty much the Monaco GP of truck racing. It gives us the opportunity to do something we’ve never done before: share our Speed Week with others and announce the winner live… To an audience whose second language is not even English.
But to make sure there will be some people in the stands, we need to do something to draw attention to us. And so The Stig leads the parade, like a kind of horsepower catcher of Hamelin. And boy, does that work. The energy of the city of Most is nothing short of spectacular. In fact, I’d venture to say that a streaking Harry Styles couldn’t have caused this kind of excitement.
Everyone is completely crazy about the cars. They crowd for selfies, some are desperate for the fourth wheel of the Morgan, and kids, dogs and those grannies behind walkers storm The Stig for an autograph. Do they know much that The Stig has no autograph. Or even know what a signature is. But the parade is just the beginning.
Top Gear Magazine Motor Show
The next day we go back to the track and open the gates of the TopGear Magazine Motor Show. At least, that is what we have now made of it, although in reality it does not amount to much more than cleaning up the empty chips bags, more or less placing the cars neatly and printing out some printouts from the internet in the hope that people will not mistake our glass house above Bend 1 for the canteen.
But to our surprise, people show up too. Thousands in fact. And it’s fascinating to gauge public opinion a bit. Naturally, you’d think the shiny, colorful, extremely pricey ones would have the magnetic pull to lure families away from the sausage and beer stands.
But then you would be wrong. It’s that damn Morgan who is the big attention grabber, who has taken on the heavy lifting of ‘getting people in’. And once they’re inside (you can rest easy, Geneva Salon organisers), they dart around the other cars, peek inside the Praga, tap the CSL’s carbon fiber bits, and take a peek inside. utter confusion to the hinges of the doors of the MC20.
We’ve got a crowd favorite
And bizarrely, they take a selfie with a cardboard Stig and leave. Immediately. Like someone dropped a stink bomb. But that’s not true. The reason is dead simple: the racing has started. And if there’s one thing these people love even more than these cars, it’s racing. The Truck Prix is what you could call the textbook example of ‘hot dogs and beer’ racing. And rightly so.
A number of motorsport events have become quite contrived in recent years, so the genuine passion and genuine enthusiasm is nothing short of refreshing. Full of warmth, truckers, families and fans from all over Europe have come to Most; you can smell the cholesterol in the air and the large truck combinations surrounding the track are almost an event in themselves.
Many of them are airbrushed enough to barely give you a nightmare during the day, all have an impressive arsenal of lights and horns, and one has a howling odometer that shows that truck has been to the moon and back – and that three times.
The action on the track
We don’t want to stand out, of course, so we fire at various obscure local fried specialties and the merchandising stands for some must-have straw and patriotic cowboy hats. shutter shades (those glasses with louvers and lights) and take a seat in the stands to see some of the action. And action is there – lots of action. And noise. And excitement.
It’s remarkable how quickly our ears adjust to the whistling of the turbochargers after the final corner, only to see plumes of diesel smoke billow into the air as the drivers shove their big, heavy monsters into their limiters before carving out a route through the apparently ever-tightening first corner.
Something we learn very quickly is that normally there is a big crash in every race. Not necessarily because of the speed, but because all kinds of panels the size of a sturdy passenger car tend to fall off the trucks. Anyway, these drivers are two meters high in the air, so they can’t be bothered; and so the right foot remains firmly pressed on the pedal until someone crosses the finish line first.
Once again the participants of Speed Week 2022
Then they hobble back to the pits, where gnarled mechanics remove and reinstall motors the size of wall units, fit a few more car-sized panels, and here we go again.
While they are busy with that, we just take the opportunity to do a smooth parade tour with our candidates. One more time we can let our inner stuntman run wild for a moment, do a few more burnouts, rev up the engines – and announce our winner in front of a frenzied crowd. And what a winner.
Believe it or not, but it is usually still a pretty difficult task for the Top Geareditors to agree during our Speed Week. But this year there’s one car that held a rare and almost revelatory appeal for everyone.
A car that we never thought could exist, mainly because it would mess too much with the internal hierarchy, which ultimately determines which car belongs where in Porsche’s noble family tree. But now that the curtains are closing as slowly as inexorably on the internal combustion engine, there is an almost palpable ‘now or never’ energy about this car.
Speed Week 2022: And the winner is…
And so the engineers threw all the bureaucracy and doubt out the window and paired one of the world’s best sports car engines with the world’s best sports car chassis. They gave it delectable steering, powerful brakes and let it walk the design ledge where restrained aggression looks purposeful but not eccentric.
They made it fast but not supersonic, to give you the confidence that you can push it harder, explore and push your limits, and go faster. He’s authentic. It’s a car that doesn’t push you in the butt by making things a little easier – it rewards you when you do something right. But he also doesn’t immediately punish you mercilessly if it doesn’t work out all at once.
It is immersive and tactile. He spreads the satisfaction fairly across all your senses. It’s the kind of car that will have your ears screaming for more noise when you get the revs in the right place, and give you tingling goosebumps all over when you hit that screaming, screeching, glorious redline at 9,000rpm. Which is still legal.
It’s also the world’s first empathetic sports car – a car that yells at you, but not at others. It is small, aggressive and usable. It’s an advent calendar that you can open every day. Your favorite song you never like repeat want to get. It’s the cure the automotive world needs, and the undisputed winner of the Top Gear Speed Week 2022. It’s the Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS.
Back to the start of Speed Week 2022?
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