375 issues ago, TopGear “at long last, powered into print”, finally supplementing the telly show that had been on British screens since 1977 with a paper-based companion. To set the tone, the team set about bringing ever single new car model on sale in the late summer of 1993 to the banking of the storied Brooklands motor racing circuit in Surrey. A Lamborghini shared the front row with a Lada. “Only one carmaker failed to provide a car – Ferrari.” Cars beyond the fifth row were lost as “blobs of colour”. It was an ambitious stunt that intimated TopGear magazine would indeed have something for everyone.
Jump forward to the summer of 2023 at the TopGear office, and we’re debating how to commemorate 30 years of the magazine, with a single shot that shows the breadth of everything the magazine has rated during its existence. We elected to pay tribute to issue 001 by gathering each and every car that’s won the TopGear Car of the Year award since its inception, and delivering the lot to the spot where the first ever mag cover was shot.
As ever with those ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ ideas, there were immediately some headaches. Chief among which was the realisation that until 2000, TG mag didn’t actually declare a Car of the Year. And the telly show only did so intermittently. We delved into the archives to see what the team rated through the Nineties, and we selected, on behalf of our forebears, the cars most deserving of posthumous TG CotY titles. That was the fun bit.
Then there was the ‘where the hell do you actually find a tidy Fiat Multipla’ bit. Tricky, that. Turns out two-tone Bugattis and bright red Ferraris are easy to source, but Pumas have rusted away faster than the Titanic. Few Fiat owners thought to preserve a bug-eyed endorsement for Italian birth control. Our maths stumbled when we discovered there were in fact two 2005 Cars of the Year. And Ford sent along a beautifully preserved Mondeo that was registered in the correct year… but was the wrong shape. Wouldn’t be very TopGear if we’d ‘got the lot’ after all.
So, we present to you the cars we’ve applauded and awarded. Happy birthday TopGear magazine. Reader, welcome to the hall of fame.