I’m in high school when I first stumble across the show. A self-proclaimed gearhead from the start, Top Gear was quickly to become an obsession for me. I watched the show ad nauseum, getting into the college routine of rolling Netflix over dinner, three bumbling British idiots testing out the broadest spectrum of cars known to history, made for a good companion to my pasta and frozen meatballs. I watched Top Gear alone and with friends, bonded in the first months of a fledgling relationship, over the ‘wallet in the Jaaaagggg’ bit, greeted fellow car enthusiasts on the street with a ‘did you see last night’s episode,’ and read the tomes of Top Gear Magazine when I managed to find them this side of the ocean.
To me Top Gear is more than a motoring show. It’s a true homage to the great history of the automobile, as it touched every walk of life from its very insurrection. One might be as likely to see an episode centered around the greatest supercars there ever were, tearing streaks across American highways, as they would be to watch a classic Reliant Robin tip end over end or getting shuttled to space. No car was safe from the show’s army of hosts, the knowledgeable and ill-dressed May, with his encyclopedic memory of car facts, the adventurous and rambunctious Hammond, who I always identified with, given his love affair with American muscle cars and our similar vertical challenges, and the brash, bullheaded, borish, Clarkson, with his utterly quotable sardonic wit, and the overwhelming feeling that he insulted everyone equally.
Apparently, no host is safe either. 
I don’t mean to get into the details of the behavior that resulted in Jeremy Clarkson’s undignified removal from the show, and its subsequent continuation without him. Though, I do recognize that Jeremy’s behavior is the very crux of everything, from his success to his departure. He’s a shock jock of the highest caliber, and any Top Gear fan or casual watcher will admit that Clarkson makes a game out of seeing just how far over the line he can go, both on screen and off.
But that’s beside the point. The damage has been done, and the greatest motoring program known to television isn’t going to ever be the same. If I sound melodramatic, I’m not sorry for it. Top Gear showed me that car TV doesn’t need to extend solely to build shows and auction programs. It told me, as a young car enthusiast, that I could be an automotive reporter and travel the world, stand at a racetrack making snide remarks about French cars, or draw giant gentlemen’s sausages in tire treads on storm drains where it never rains. The whole point of Top Gear was absolute fun, but done in a way that left the watcher feeling satisfied and often clutching their sides.
Much of that had to do with the sheer force of the production team. The cinematography of the show in its later seasons was on par with National Geographic nature programming. Stunning is word that often comes to mind, when considering the opening scenes of an average episode, when the droll British voice over expanded on the features, specs and styling of a latest super car. No other car program comes close to the sheer obsession, an almost religious like respect, that Top Gear paid to the whole of cars. Even if an hour-long program went by without a single mention of speed, or smallest crumb of usable consumer information, it didn’t matter. The viewer trusted this ragtag crew to always know what they were talking about, even if the knowledge was accompanied by the uncharitable addition of cheese to a radiator, or radio rewiring for the sole sake of driving a fellow host down the rabbit hole.
So now what? Well, the show will go on, and aside from one rumor, Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, which according to BBC News, he’s vehemently denied any truth in, there have been no stirrings as to who, if anyone, might replace Clarkson. And Top Gear will still be good. It’ll still be fantastic, with its quirk and humor, and the novel length magazines, and all that makes it what it is. But it won’t be the Top Gear that we know, simply because it can’t be. Like many enthusiasts of the show, I always believed Clarkson to be untouchable. He might have been a reprobate of the highest order, but he was too highly valued by the show and the station to have ever been let go. So I never imaged a scenario after he did, but it happened.
Will another show rise up to take its place? Unlikely, even as Clarkson considers his varied and enticing options from other networks. No, he was the biggest wheel in a series of cogs and levels, and while the machine won’t run as well without him, he’s little use to anyone without the team, style and guts of the show he’s leaving behind. The car TV show game will be a level playing field now. Top Gears USA and Australia, as well as the many non-English speaking variants, have had their chance, and still they never rose to the quality of the original. I have little faith they will now. The rebuild and selling shows will continue to do what they do, and do it well. There will be build challenges, and auctions, and road trips, but they never were really a competitor for Top Gear’s audience anyway.
No, instead we shall watch the remaining shows, and love them, and that will be okay. May and Hammond might be able to pull off a few more seasons of tomfoolery, and we’ll all tune in, even knowing it’s not the same. We’ll watch reruns on Netflix and BBC America, and appreciate the show for what it was, for what it did to the world of motoring, and the homage it paid to the automobile. And that’s it. And somewhere in history, the fourteen year old version of me just made a promise to herself to drive that Top Gear track one – a promise that present me has no choice but to break. I’m sure I’m not the only one.