Post by Kasey Kagawa

Even though I’ve said some mean things about Top Gear in the past, I still love her and hope that she replies to my desperate, tearful phone messages I leave her in the middle of the night, and anxiously await the next season so I might be able to watch the show again. What would be even better is a US version of Top Gear, preferably hosted by actual car journalists instead of the bunch they hired for the US pilot version last year (a reality show contestant was in the mix) that was apparently so hideously bad it’s never been shown to the public. According to a recent article by The Sun, plans were in place to have Clarkson, Hammond and May fly across the Atlantic to the US and shoot a US version of the show for a few months, and according to that same article, Clarkson refused to participate. His stated reasons were mostly family-related. The Sun article tries to make it look like Clarkson hates the US enough to refuse to live there for the period of time needed to film the show, and that might be true, but I think that it’s much more likely that he and the rest of the Top Gear hosts and crew didn’t want to spend months away from their families on top of the months and months they spend working on the UK version of the show. After all, they just finished attempting to cross the English Channel in their homebuilt amphibious cars and having Clarkson and May drive a Toyota pickup to the North Pole while Hammond went there in a dogsled. Time with their families is tight enough that Hammond ditched his car and ran 16 miles after traffic from flooding held him up from getting home to be with his daughter on her birthday. Asking much more from them doesn’t seem fair, so I guess I’ll just have to wait until they sort out a new set of hosts for the US version.

Clarkson nixes U.S. Top Gear [Autoblog]