- Clarksonisms

Motor from a food blender?

On the TVR Tuscan 2 “It’s supposed to be easier to live with, and easier to drive... so has it worked? Ohh... Oh, my God. No... no... no, no, no. No. No. No, it hasn’t.”

What did the Morris Marina compete against? Walking? The bus?

On the Lotus Exige “To get an idea of just how spartan this thing is, you just have to look through the rear window. Back there you’ve got chicken wire, bacofoil and tupperware. It’s kind of like peering into one of your grannies’ old kitchen cabinets.”

Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano "There, right in the middle of everything, is a quartic steering wheel. Yup, quartic, as in square, as in Austin Allegro. And worse still, it’s half carbon fibre and half leather, and it’s got all sorts of Formula One-style buttons on the bottom and then, along the top, a series of red lights that come on to tell you when to change gear. Unfortunately they are so bright you think you’ve been caught in the fearsome glare from a Martian spaceship. "So you don’t change gear. You crash."

[Stretch Limos Challenge] - ... for some extraodinary reason the rules say you can't drive a 46-foot car on the public highway, so I had to do some surgery...

You can't be a true petrolhead until you've owned an Alfa Romeo

Peugeot 407 Coupé 2.7 V6 HDi SE "It has the zip of a chairlift. With plodding performance and steady-as-she-goes handling the only thing this car will make you feel like is a cup of Horlicks with a splash of hemlock. Empty-nesters should buy a PlayStation instead, and spend the afternoon shooting crack whores."

Kia Rio "You may have seen The Fly II, in which a scientist attempts to teleport a dog. In one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve seen in a film it arrives at its destination completely inside out. Well the Rio is uglier than that. Inside, things get worse. "Small wonder Kia’s importer in Britain is sponsoring the Pedestrian Association’s Walking Bus scheme. The idea is that parents take it in turns to walk a group, or "bus", of children to their school in a morning. After three days of being transported in the Rio, my kids thought it was a brilliant idea to walk instead. Even though their school is 18 miles away and it was blowing a gale directly from the Canadian tundra."

Motorized pepper grinder?

Assessing Hammond's crash: Clarkson: "you can see from the tape that the tyre is starting to come apart. Now why didn't you spot that?!" Hammond: "I had a lot on: I was doing 288 mph." Clarkson: "What do you mean you had a lot on? I can be in the office on the phone, doing the paperwork, kids are shouting at me, wife etc, but if a lion walks in, I'm going to notice it!"

"So having a twin turbo V12 diesel is like, turning your central heating off at home, and then keeping warm ... by burning Rembrandts." Audi Q7 V12 TDI

On the Renault Clio V6 “I think the problem is that it’s French. It’s a surrendermonkey.”

BMW 645Ci "If you were to buy a 6-series, I recommend you select reverse when leaving friends’ houses so they don’t see its backside."

The engine sounds like a Spitfire fighter plane

You cannot have this car with a diesel. It's like saying, I won't go to Stringfellows tonight, I'll get my mum to give me a lap dance, she's a woman!

[on his own driving test] - I didn't see it as a driving test so much as a confirmation of my excelence.

on Ferrari F430: "the basic price is about 118,000 pound, which is not really bad. I mean, sell the house, sell the children for medical experiment, rob a bank, and you will soon get that money"

Volkswagen Jetta "I’d love to meet the man who styled the exterior, to find out if he’d done it as some sort of a joke. But mostly I’d like to meet the man who simply didn’t bother at all with the interior. Because looking at that dashboard gives you some idea of what it might be like to be dead."

There are signs directing you away from Birmingham but nothing enticing you in.

Aston Martin Vanquish S "This is the last of the old-school Astons. It was built in the Newport Pagnell factory by men with body odour and hammers, rather than on the computer- controlled production line of the new Gaydon plant. And it shows. The car costs more than any other Aston yet is no quicker; its paddle shift gearbox is hilariously bad and its interior looks glued together from the Ford parts bin. It is the equivalent of opting for a rusty saw and leeches in the age of laser-guided brain surgery. Who is Aston kidding?

On Detroit “God may have created the world in six days, but while he was resting on the seventh, Beelzebub popped up and did this place."

On the Mercedes CLS55 AMG “It sounds like Barry White eating wasps.”

Biathletes need to eat 6,000 calories a day: six thousand! That’s the equivalent of two pounds of butter, 70 slices of bread, 112 eggs, 86 tabs of yogurts, 28 potatoes, 117 biscuits and 21 Twix bars. On that basis, I could be an Olympic biathlete!

Clarksonisms

Affectionately referred to as Clarksonisms, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson's quips are the stuff of legends among car enthusiasts...

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