Top Gear is back on BBC2

... wer es noch nicht gemerkt hat - Wiederholung 31.01.

ab sofort Top Gear wieder Sonntags in BBC2...

On it’s-been-a-long-time-coming Top Gear, a fully mended Richard Hammond returned to your screens. Jeremy tried to decide if the Jaguar XKR is a match for its Teutonic rivals, and the presenters broke the habit of a lifetime and attempted a spot of manual labour.

After making a stunning recovery, Hammond talked us through his jet car experience and terrifying 288mph crash that followed. He made a grand entrance, Top Gear-style, and showed us the successful runs he made in the Vampire jet car, before finally getting to the footage of the accident itself. It was chilling stuff, but made his rapid return to fighting fitness seem all the more miraculous.

Jeremy meanwhile got his hands on one of the most hotly anticipated cars of the year – the supercharged Jaguar XKR. It certainly looked the part with bonnet vents, big wheels and aluminium gills. It’s like a normal car but with cufflinks and a nice watch. It doesn’t have the gargantuan power of its German rivals, but thankfully it’s gifted with a chassis which is so good it makes a BMW or Mercedes look like they’re made from wood. Clarkson thought it was quite simply spectacular.

Apparently, even with the latest equipment and techniques, it takes a professional construction crew a week to resurface just one and-a-half miles of rural B-road. We felt that this was patently ridiculous, so we set Jeremy, Richard and James the challenge of resurfacing the D5481 outside Bidford-on-Avon in just 24 hours.

Admittedly they had a bit of help, such as 70-ish large men, and employed some rather Dickensian working practises, like only allowing the crew to eat what they could forage from the hedgerows. But still - they did it!

Jamie Oliver returned as a guest on the programme and attempted to knock rival celebrity cook Gordon Ramsay off the top spot. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. Perhaps the raw power of our reasonably priced Chevrolet Lacetti was too much for him.