Here are some more Clarkson quotes:
9: Clarkson on diesel motors
Clarkson's talent for similes can make even car motors interesting. "Sure it's quiet, for a diesel. But that's like being well-behaved... for a murderer."
7: Clarkson on bad gadgets
When testing the Bentley Continental GT, Jezza just couldn't see the point in a lever on the dash that adjusted the suspension. He concluded: "It really is about as useful as putting a snooze button on a smoke alarm."
6: Clarkson on family cars
He may prefer roaring down roads in Mustangs, but here's Clarkson being nice about a lowly family car: "Much more of a hoot to drive than you might imagine. Think of it, if you like, as a librarian with a G-string under the tweed. I do, and it helps."
2: Clarkson on cricket
Attending a cricket match, Clarkson had this to say on the audience: "Fathers and their sons dressed in matching blazers and slacks, as though women hadn't been involved in the breeding process at all. You just open up the chap like a Russian doll, and out pops another one."
[about Ferrari Enzo] Ferrari is so pleased with it, they've named it after the founder of the company. They call it the Enzo. That'd be the same as Lotus calling their next car..."The Colin".
Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.
We start tonight with the highlight of my childhood. It's the Ladybird Book of Motorcars from 1963, and as you would imagine it's full of rubbish really. Just endless boring grey shapes, until you get to page 40, where you find the Maserati 3500 GT. Now this for me, when I was little, was like kind of Jordan and Cameron Diaz. In a bath together. With a Lightning jet fighter. And lots of jelly.
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If this were America, it would be full of people doing... whatever it is they do. Incest, mostly, I think.
There are many things I'd rather be doing than driving it, including waiting for Bernard Manning to come off stage in a sweaty nightclub, and then licking his back clean.
That Zonda, really! It's like a lion in orange dungarees. Kind of fierce, but ridiculous all at the same time.
as something to live with every day, I'd rather have bird flu.
1 Maserati Quattroporte
"In a list of the five most rubbish things in the world, I’d have America’s foreign policy at five. Aids at four. Iran’s nuclear programme at three. Gordon Brown at two and Maserati’s gearbox at number one. It is that bad."
2 BMW 1 Series
"I’m choosing the words for my conclusion with even more care than usual. So here goes. The 1-series is crap.
4 Land Rover Defender 90 Td5 Station Wagon
"Often fourth isn’t enough to get you up a hill, so you drop down to third and it feels as though you’ve been hit in the back with a wrecking ball. All of a sudden you’re doing 35mph but your eight-ton suit of armour, making a noise that sounds like the birth of the universe, has come to an almost dead stop.
"What’s more, there still isn’t enough room behind the wheel for anyone with shoulders or legs, there are still sharp edges, it’s as bouncy as a small dog at suppertime, and as a result it’s about as much fun to drive as a punctured wheelbarrow. And it’s not like the misery is short-lived, because each trip to the shops can, and does, take two or three weeks."
5 Perodua Kelisa 1.0 GXi
"This is without doubt the worst car, not just in its category but in the world. It has a top speed of 88mph but takes so long to reach it that no one has ever lived long enough to verify the claim, the inside is tackier than Anthea Turner’s wedding and you don’t want to think what would happen if it bumped into a lamppost.
"Also its name sounds like a disease."
7 Mitsubishi Warrior
"’What,’ I exclaimed, ’in the name of all that’s holy, do we want one of those for?’ We’re European. We were sipping tea while the Americans were shooting Indians. We’ve had 2,000 years to get used to civilisation, not 20 minutes. We’re advanced, we’re slim, we’re at the cutting edge of evolution. We think that shooting bears is daft. Budweiser gives us a headache and we think George Bush is an arse.
"So why in God’s name do we want to drive around in a car made from a hen house and two bits of railway track?"
10 Volkswagen Jetta
"I’d love to meet the man who styled the exterior, to find out if he’d done it as some sort of a joke. But mostly I’d like to meet the man who simply didn’t bother at all with the interior. Because looking at that dashboard gives you some idea of what it might be like to be dead."
11 BMW 645Ci
"If you were to buy a 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside."
“In the olden days I always got the impression that TVR built a car, put it on sale, and then found out how it handled. Usually when one of their customers wrote to the factory complaining about how dead he was.”
“This is a Renault Espace, probably the best of the people carriers. Not that’s much to shout about. That’s like saying, ‘Ooh good, I’ve got Syphilis, the best of the sexually transmitted diseases’.”
“Telling people at a dinner party you drive a Nissan Almera is like telling them you’ve got the ebola virus and you’re about to sneeze.”
“In many ways then this car is like herpes. Great fun catching it but not so much fun live with every day.”
