Top Gear Live is coming to South Africa. The exhibition will be held at Grand West Arena at Grand West Casino in Cape Town between the 28th of January and the 30th of January 2010 and at the Coca-Cola Dome in Johannesburg between the 4th of February and 7th of February 2010. Famed for their legendary globe-trotting antics, the 3 Top Gear presenters (Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May) took inspiration from some of the world’s most famous explorers including Livingstone, Shackleton, Scott, Sir Edmund Hillary.
The Top Gear Live crew have been working hard on finding new ideas and welding things together that don’t match. The process involved a lot of nodding. The result is a completely new show featuring the world’s fastest cars pushed to their mechanical limits, acrobats laying their lives on the line and some middle aged men falling over and catching fire a bit. Fans can expect an edge-of-their-seats experience with flaming rally cars, extreme underground street racers and cars which change colour in the blink of an eye. Other sequences will feature the infamous Stig who will be leading our troop of international stunt drivers via a mix of hand gestures, sonic pulses and Morse code, showing audiences the ultimate in precision driving.

This definately sounds like an interesting exhibition / show. I’m sure that fans of the popular BBC TV series will not be disappointed. South African fans can acquire tickets from Computicket. More information can be obtained on the the show’s official website.

In the first episode of the new Top Gear season on BBC 2 on British television, 7 times Formula 1 champion and racing car driver Michael Schumacher, revealed himself as the show’s famous driver and removed his helmet during an interview with presenter Jeremy Clarkson. Appalling driving by Schumacher at the end of the show has cast doubt on this “revelation”. In the show Jeremy Clarkson told viewers “I don’t think Michael Schumacher is the Stig”.

Earlier Clarkson revealed in his column in the British daily, the Sun, that “The Stig” identity would be a “staggering surprise” to fans and regular viewers of Top Gear. “As a television moment, it’s up there with Neil Armstrong walking on the… corpse of JR Ewing,” Clarkson added. A BBC spokesman said “As Jeremy said, in tonight’s Top Gear Stig will remove his helmet for the first time.” After the episode, a BBC spokeswoman would not confirm whether or not Michael Schumacher was the genuine Stig, or a stunt to mark the first episode of a new series of Top Gear. She said “You have to bear in mind that Top Gear is an entertainment programme. We never reveal who or what The Stig is”. This casts doubt on whether this is the real “Stig” or not. According to other sources there is no one person who is the Stig, but up to six drivers who take it in turns. Reports in January named former racer Ben Collins as the Stig, while Perry McCarthy, a former F1 driver, was the original character. This probably was a publicity stunt since Top Gear has also been a victim of the Global Economic Crisis and has been subject of budget cuts at the BBC.