TG2: Cars and Stripes… full series preview!

Top Gear is coming to America! Well, technically, we’ve already been... to film a new online only show TG2: Cars and Stripes, kicking off on YouTube and TopGear.com from Sunday 19 Nov. The premise is simple: two British blokes – Jack Rix (TG magazine’s esteemed editor) and Jethro Bovingdon (renowned car journalist and presenter of Top Gear America) – driving American cars... in America.

Prepare for highs (see above) and lows, EVs and dirty great V8s, races and challenges, driving skills and driving spills with some friendly-ish armchair debate in-between. Get your star spangled brave pants on, because here’s what to expect across the five 30-minute episodes we’ve got coming up...

The Bronco DR is oh so much more than just a Bronco with stripes and shoulder pads... it’s a bona fide off-the-shelf desert racer (hence the name), meaning for a mere $295,000 you could own a competition-ready, Coyote 5.0-litre V8 powered, off-road racecar capable of conquering pretty much any terrain this side of the moon. Or you could ask Ford very nicely to borrow one, insert Jethro in the middle of the Californian desert, light the touch paper and retire to a safe distance as he demonstrates what makes this car so special...

Chris Ashton, cofounder/design director of video game company Turtle Rock Studios, is a curious fella. He builds cars, beautiful hand-built machines that fuse the American dream with distinct Mad Max vibes, but he builds them for himself to unwind, spending endless hours on a fantastically analogue and simple tool, the English wheel.

Clearly, we had to go and see this maestro at work, but also take the chance to drive his mangetout green 1970 Mustang Fastback built and hand formed himself with nothing more than patience, curiosity and a playlist of YouTube videos. Naturally, Jethro took it to a racetrack and gave the tyres a good workout.

“Where did all the manuals go?” asks Jethro as he drags his poor withered left leg behind him. Because the rise of the EV and the proliferation of the auto has seen manuals all but disappear from UK shores. America, on the other hand, is positively rolling in them. Weird.

So we grabbed two of the most exciting manuals on sale in the US that we don’t get back in Blighty, and set about proving once and for all that manual beats auto. To do this we required several things: Jack in a Ford Maverick compact pickup truck, some traffic cones, a stopwatch and skids. Lots of lovely skids.

The new Mustang Shelby GT500-H has over 900bhp and can be rented from a bog standard Hertz booth... so we flew to New York and did so gladly. However, despite this car being a direct descendant of the 1966 GT350-H – the first Shelby/Hertz collab and the original rent-a-racer – Hertz was adamant that no track driving or road racing was allowed.

Which got us thinking about a race of our own: could a 937bhp Mustang complete the 26.2-mile New York marathon course quicker than the elite male course record of 2h:05m:06s, set by Geoffrey Mutai of Kenya in 2011?

(Here's a quick fact for you: Johnson Valley - pictured here - is a mix of steep red rocky mountains, rolling hills, dry lake beds and sandy washes. With the right permit, all 96,000 acres can be yours to play in...)

The Bronco Raptor is a formidable beast – wider than most buildings, fitted with 37-inch off-road tyres and Fox suspension, and powered by a 412bhp twin-turbo V6 – and it’s therefore perfect for doing silly things in the sand and dirt.

The F-150 Raptor R, with its 700bhp 5.2-litre supercharged V8, even more so. So we stuck Jack in the former, Jethro in the latter, and told them to go shredding in the infinite off-road playground that is Johnson Valley, California. Things get a little hairier when Jack asks Jethro to “show him the way of the jump”. Those of a nervous disposition, look away now.

Imagine funds weren’t an issue and you wanted to build the ultimate off-road 911 – who would you call first? Well, if you want it to look exquisite and be ready for anything up to and including the Dakar Rally, you want it designed by Singer and engineered by Tuthill Porsche. That’s what the ACS is, a reimagined 964 911 we first saw back in 2021, where imaginations have been allowed to run wild and free.

Much like us when we got the nod from the more than generous owner. The challenge here? To enjoy it as its creators intended, while keeping one eye on the fact that it’s worth more than the entire crew’s houses put together.

Life is not fair – One Direction refuses to reform, we can’t find a Caramac bar for love nor money and the US gets a pile of cool cars we don’t. To prove the problem is real and requires drastic and immediate rectification, Jethro and Jack gathered a Toyota GR Corolla (that shares much of its running gear and underpinnings with the sublime GR Yaris) and a Subaru BRZ (that shares almost all its underpinnings with the sublime Toyota GR86) and took them to a racetrack in Arizona. The mission? To construct a watertight argument for why both cars should be brought to the UK immediately.

If you've been reading TG mag recently you’ll know the idea behind this. Take a stock Jeep Wrangler Rubicon plug-in hybrid to a little town in Utah called Moab, explain why it’s brilliant, indulge in some light off-roading and head home with our no claims bonus intact. Except we found ourselves scaling a trail called Cliffhanger, one of the most unforgiving tracks in the world where the drops are so long “you could read a book on the way down”. Warning: if you don’t like the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, the noise of Jeep meeting rock isn’t much better.

The new GMC Hummer EV is not subtle. The $110k Edition 1 model we borrowed for an epic roadtrip from Palm Springs to Bagdad had three motors – two at the back, one at the front – producing 1,000bhp and 1,200lb ft of torque. It could do 0–62mph in 3.0secs, which is basically as quick as a Ferrari 296 GTB. And that’s not the scary bit. It has a claimed range of 329 miles, which is pretty good, but only because it has a huge 205kWh battery – that’s the same as six Honda ‘e’s, and it weighs... wait for it... about 4,100kg, equivalent to nine Caterham 170Rs.

Not all driving instructors are made the same. Travis Pastrana, for example – not massively concerned with parallel parking or correct use of indicators, but having all four tyres fully lit at all times is non-negotiable. He shuns the typical dual control Vauxhall Corsa, too, in favour of something a little more practical... and manoeuvrable. Click here to find out what happened when Jethro met Travis and took a 1983 Subaru GL wagon with 862bhp, aka The Family Huckster, for a spin...