The world,s best car magazine: Top Gear hosts NASCAR race: the report

This weekend, Top Gear had a race. Not one of those challenges where Jeremy drives something fast and James flies a plane made from string. But an actual, live NASCAR race, with our name on it. The Top Gear 300 ran on Saturday at Charlotte Motor Speedway, North Carolina as part of the Nationwide Cup Series; over 60,000 people turned up to see it, and millions more watched on telly. The presenters of Top Gear US were there to start proceedings, Stig drove the pace car, and a Finnish guy called Kimi Raikkonen turned up to take on the Americans.

As it happened, Kimi’s debut in the NASCAR Nationwide wasn’t a particularly auspicious one: he was as high as 13^th place at one point, before a pit-lane speeding penalty and some heavy damage to his front splitter put him all the way back to a 27^th place finish (the Jalopnik website have pulled some out-takes from his radio communication to his crew to see how he found his first foray into NASCAR (WARNING: adult language in the link)).

In a close finish Matt Kenseth (above) eventually overtook his Roush Fenway Racing team-mate Carl Edwards to win the race, with Kyle Busch third.

It was recognisably a Top Gear race. Lots of stuff fell off the cars, there were plenty of crashes, and things caught fire. Nobody actually got lost, but then NASCAR’s norm of driving in a circle for a few hours does make that extremely unlikely. Still, everyone seemed to like it.

Kimi meets Adam and Rutledge from Top Gear US

Don’t just take our Limey word for it. Rutledge Wood, when he’s not busy crashing stuff himself on Top Gear US, is a regular NASCAR pundit on Speed TV, the biggest car-ish TV channel in the States. He knows about this stuff, so over to him.

So Rutledge, how was the actual race for NASCAR fans?

It was great! Kyle Busch was leading early, and Carl Edwards was digging hard in second, before he opened up a can of whoop-ass on everybody and took the lead… until his teammate Matt Kenseth got around him with just a few laps to go. It was a killer ending to a great race. To see them battling at the end was very cool.

Not bad, considering Top Gear races normally end in disaster.

Seeing the Top Gear logos out there was huge. The NASCAR drivers are fans of the show – Carl Edwards records it when he’s busy racing. And they let the Stig drive the pace car. Then they let me start the race. And because we had a female racer out there, I ditched the traditional words and went with ‘Lady and gentleman, start your engines!’ It got a decent response…

Even Kimi Raikkonen turned up. Why’s that?

NASCAR attracts the best drivers in the world – there’s a reason Kimi came here. We didn’t call him, he called us. It was the same thing with Montoya – he’s done great, but it’s so hard to win here. People who’ve never been to a race make fun of it, and say we just go round in circles. And that’s a valid argument… if you’ve never been to one. Our drivers are super-skilled. You go from mega grip to no grip in an instant. This track is super-fast – they’re running 190mph plus, while their bumpers touch. It takes so much skill to think about that. And the g force is insane! To be good, you have to be flawless.

The crowds have clearly been having a great time today…

Honestly, the racing is just part of it. Because our racetracks are generally in the middle of nowhere, we bring the party to the track and stretch it out over a few days. The fans are what make this work – otherwise we’re just 300 idiots in an empty parking lot. The infield is full of campers, with RVs and these old converted school buses. This is where those buses come to die! People modify them to make them different – sometimes they’ll cut the back half off and make it into a pickup.

So it’s just one big party?

Absolutely! You can have a church service on one side of the campsite, and naked girls on the other. Many different sides of life come together here. One year we had a colossal stripper pole out in Texas, and people put spotlights on it. At Talladega, there’s an on-site jail. And people get married here way more than you think. If that happens to you, you might just be a redneck.

Words and pics: Dan Read. For more from the Top Gear 300, check out next month’s Top Gear magazine.

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