Official: a sneak preview of our new series!

Well it's been a while, but you can relax. Top Gear telly's back! As you may well have read in your brand spanking new Top Gear magazine, we're currently due to return to BBC Two at 8pm on January 27! And guess what? You're getting the long-awaited Christmas Special thrown into this series, too, which is inexplicably scheduled for transmission in, erm, early 2013...

So, what lovely things can you expect from series 19? Well, young internetling, point your mouse at the next button and click on to find out. And don't forget to keep checking TopGear.com for the usual bevy of exclusive behind-the-scenes videos from the presenters, rants from our production team, blogs from our esteemed producer, the cutting edge of cocking about and, of course, the planet's finest cars.

Remember when Jeremy quite literally drove a Peel P50 into work? Well, in the five years between then and how, he's been doing some serious thinking. And concluded that it was a bit too... big. So he commissioned some very talented students from the Coventry University Design course to build him something even smaller...

As James, Jeremy and Richard will tell you, the Bentley Continental GT leaves a very Cheshirey taste in the mouth. So when the company revealed its new GT Speed model - the company's fastest ever production car with a 205mph top speed - we thought we should test it and find out if you can, erm, turn it into a WRC car....

The producers have mixed up a failsafe cocktail of awesomeness with this series' ‘Merican adventure. Across the Nevada desert to the Mexican border in the new Dodge Viper, Aston Martin Vanquish, and a Lexus LFA.

We offer the definitive answer to an age-old quandary - what's the fastest way to get from Britain to Italy to watch a football match in the San Siro stadium in Milan if you only have £35,000 to spend on a car? Road or rail? James and Richard take the train, Jeremy's in a surprisingly inexpensive Shelby Mustang GT500.

Jeremy and Richard design the perfect vehicle for Britain's ever-growing pensioner population. To test it, we recruit some old people to take a trip the south coast of England for a sit down and nice cup of tea.

Have you been fantasising about the buttery, thunderous engine thrum of our Kia Cee'd? Intrigued by what deliciousness the latest iteration will hold? Jeremy's on hand to administer a very thorough road test to answer the questions that really matter - is it faster than a GT-R? Is it any good if you're a sodium and eels salesman? Can it play international rugby?

Hammond's car of 2012 attempts to lay down all of its 730 horsepowers onto our track. Will it knock the V8 Atom off its perch?

Toyota's keenly priced RWD coupe gets a Stig insertion. It goes well. And sideways.

Jeremy tests 825bhp's worth of hot hatchery in the shape of the Ford Focus ST, Renault Megane Renaultsport Cup 265 and Vauxhall Astra VXR. Prepare for smoking front tyres...

Clarkson, Hammond and May are off to Africa in a bid to find the source of the Nile. And yes, it's already sort of been discovered (Victorian explorers John Speke and Richard Burton thought they'd nailed it back in the mid-19th century). But fresh sources have cropped up - a Belgium found one, so did Joanna Lumley - and the boys wanted a piece of the action. And their names in the history books...

Their tools? Cars bought off the internet for £1500...