Video: welcome to Top Gear magazine's Speed Week 2023

Speed Week is the highlight of Top Gear magazine’s year. Getting 15 cars (including the Lamborghini Sterrato, Porsche 911 GT3 RS, and even a Formula E car) and 16 journalists, photographers and videographers to an island off the east coast of Sweden, finding somewhere to sleep, things to eat and producing a library’s worth of the world’s greatest car content over the course of a few days was a logistical cluster bomb. But we did it. And with a nod to our carbon footprint.

It won’t have escaped your attention that wildfires are raging, dams are bursting and even the UK has been melting in near 40°C heat. Fixing these problems, or at least stemming the tide of climate change, is the responsibility of all of us, which is how the plan to try to decarbonise Speed Week came about. The idea wasn’t to carry on as normal then pay a third party to plant some trees on our behalf, but to look at our own actions and reduce our carbon footprint where possible.

So we went to a sustainable race track, used the latest in trucking tech to get cars there, fuelled them with biofuel, used EVs as support cars, charged them with the wind, stayed communally and ate locally. Turns out it’s not an exact science, and we had to travel to Sweden to find the perfect venue, but we hope we’ve proved it’s possible to still enjoy the cars we love, while treading a little lighter on our planet.

Now watch some cars do some skids.