Quotes from Jeremy Clarkson
1. [On the Enzo Ferrari] “I rang up Jay Kay, who’s got one, and said: “Can we borrow yours?” and he said, “Yeah, if I can borrow your daughter, because it amounts to the same thing.”
2. [On the Mercedes CLS55 AMG] “It sounds like Barry White eating wasps.”
3. “That [Pagani] Zonda, really! It’s like a lion in orange dungarees. Kind of fierce, but ridiculous all at the same time.”
4. “Speed has never killed anyone, suddenly becoming stationary... that’s what gets you.”
5. [On the Porsche Cayman S] “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.”
6. “Owning a TVR in the past was like owning a bear. I mean it was great, until it pulled your head off, which it would.”
7. [On the Alfa Romeo Brera] “Think of it as Angelina Jolie. You’ve heard she’s mad and eats nothing but wallpaper paste. But you would, wouldn’t you?”
8. [On paddle shift automatic gearboxes] “The thing is, it’s a gearbox, okay? It has one job to do! One job! Pull the lever… ‘Am I a pencil? Am I a cauliflower? Am I a nuclear power station – I’m a gearbox! Oh, heavens, I’m gonna swap some cogs around!’”
9. “The Ferrari 355 is like a quail’s egg dipped in celery salt and served in Julia Roberts’ belly button.”
10. [On the Porsche Boxster] “It couldn't pull a greased stick out of a pig’s bottom.”
11. [On the Enzo Ferrari] “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.’”
12. [On the Ford GT40] “Was this the greatest hypercar of them all? Well, that’s a question I’ve never really been able to answer, because the GT40 is 40 inches tall... and I'm not.”
13. [On the TVR Tuscan 2] “It’s supposed to be easier to live with, and easier to drive... so has it worked? Ohh... Oh, my God. No... no... no, no, no. No. No. No, it hasn’t.”
14. [On the TVR Tuscan 2] “You see, my wife loves this car. She loves the noise and the vibrations and the sense of danger and the way that when you over-rev it, the whole dash lights up like a baboon’s backside. Richard Hammond on the other hand, he pretty much hates it. He says it’s too difficult and too complicated and that all the stitching in here looks like the kind of stitching you find when someone’s tried to mend their own shoes.”
15. [On the Lotus Exige] “To get an idea of just how spartan this thing is, you just have to look through the rear window. Back there you’ve got chicken wire, bacofoil and tupperware. It’s kind of like peering into one of your grannies’ old kitchen cabinets.”
16. “Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It’s like making a hardcore 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.”
17. “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 kind of like Jordan and Cameron Diaz. In a bath together. With a Lightning jet fighter. And lots of jelly.”
18. [Announcing the Top Gear Awards in December 2005] “Now the best gas guzzler of the year. And the nominations are: the Range Rover Sport which achieved eight miles to the gallon; the Bugatti Veyron which achieved four miles to the gallon; and Hemel Hempstead. That actually used up 60 million gallons of fuel and didn’t move an inch.
19. [When driving the Mercedes SLR McLaren through a tunnel] “When they debate as to what the sound of the SLR engine was akin to, the British engineers from McLaren said it sounded like a Spitfire. But the German engineers from Mercedes said ‘Nein! Nein! Sounds like a Messerschmitt!’ They were both wrong. It sounds like the God of Thunder, gargling with nails.”
20. [On the Corvette Z06] “As something to live with every day, I’d rather have bird flu.”
21. [While playing the video game Gran Turismo] “Aston Martin DB9 – that’s not a racecar, that’s pornography.”
22. “If you were to buy a [BMW] 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside.”
23. “There are signs directing you away from Birmingham but nothing enticing you in.”
24. [On Detroit] “God may have created the world in six days, but while he was resting on the seventh, Beelzebub popped up and did this place.”
25. [On the Porsche Cayenne] “I’ve seen gangrenous wounds better looking than this!”
26. “A turbo: exhaust gasses go into the turbocharger and spin it, witchcraft happens and you go faster.”
27. “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.”
28. “I’d like to consider Ferrari as a scaled down version of God.”
29. “The Caterham may only have 250bhp, but you have to remember that it weighs about the same... as a J-cloth.”
30. “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.”
31. “The old Aston Martin DB7 was just a Jag in drag. It was an XJ-S in a party frock. This (the Aston-Martin DB-9) is completely different.”
32. “I’d rather go to work on my hands and knees than drive there in a Ford Galaxy. Whoever designed the Ford Galaxy upholstery had a cauliflower fixation. I would rather have a vasectomy than buy a Ford Galaxy.”
33. [On cars at a Max Power show) “Most of these cars will do 0-60 once....and then they’ll blow up.”
34. “What did the Morris Marina compete against? Walking? The bus?
35. “Whenever I’m suffering from insomnia, I just look at a picture of a Toyota Camry and I’m straight off.”
36. “Usually, a Range Rover would be beaten away from the lights by a diesel powered wheelbarrow.”
37. [On the Renault Clio V6] “I think the problem is that it’s French. It’s a surrendermonkey.”
38. “It costs Volkswagen £200 pounds to buy a set of four fuel injectors for the Golf diesel. Kia could probably make a couple of cars for that.”
39. [On Segways] “They’re made in America, of course, so fat Yanks can go to the fridge without expending any energy.”
40. [On a Chevrolet Corvette] “The Americans lecture the world on democracy and then won’t let me turn the traction control off!”
41. [On the Koenigsegg CCX] “I think Koenigsegg is Swedish for: Oh no, my head has just exploded!”
42. “If you have any thoughts or opinions on what you’ve seen in the last ten weeks, do please keep them to yourselves.”
43. “Biathletes need to eat 6,000 calories a day: six thousand! That’s the equivalent of two pounds of butter, 70 slices of bread, 112 eggs, 86 tabs of yogurts, 28 potatoes, 117 biscuits and 21 Twix bars. On that basis, I could be an Olympic biathlete!”
44. “This is a Renault Espace, probably the best of the people carriers. Not that that’s much to shout about. That’s like saying ‘Oh good, I’ve got syphilis, the best of the sexually transmitted diseases!’”
45. “Koenigsegg are saying that the CCX is more comfortable. More comfortable than what... being stabbed?”
46. “I’m sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch. If you’ve got even half a scrotum it’s not going to happen.”
47. “The air conditioning in Lamborghinis used to be an asthmatic sitting in the dashboard blowing at you through a straw.”
48. “I don’t understand bus lanes. Why do poor people have to get to places quicker than I do?”
