From our host:

We would like to take this time to inform you that we will perform maintenance on all servers, on Sunday, July 2nd, from 8AM to 8PM CST (GMT-6). During this time your site might not be accessible.

I don’t think the site will be down entirely during that period, but we’ll have to see.

Yeah, I know I’m a bit late in posting this as the magazine is already on sale, but I still thought I’d pass along what in the latest issue for anyone who’s interested. ;)

We love muscle cars
All-American icon showdown in the desert

This month, we headed off to California’s Mojave Desert and brought along a Dodge Viper, a Mustang GT500 and a Corvette Z06 for a spin - as you do.

Still Stateside, we checked out the Chevy Camaro too, before heading back to the Mojave with the Dodge Challenger prototype.

Plus the Jaguar XKR Coupe and Clarkson on how he became the next Buzz Lightyear!

Drive
The new Audi TT - yep, it’s good

Style still counts a lot for the new TT but now it has the substance to back it up. Paul Horrell puts the Audi beast through it paces.

We also get the verdict on the impressive Volvo XC90, breaking away from its traditionally conservative image, and the stylish and easy to drive Sportwagon from Alfa Romeo, plus the Skoda Roomster, Lexus GS450 and Citroen C2 amongst others.

If you’d like to discuss the latest issue or see it’s cover, please visit this thread in our forum. :)

Okay, after spending a good 4 or 5 hours checking to see if a torrent link was broken and then if so, editing and uploading the torrent and then updating the database to reflect the new Mininova ID, I am officially sick of dealing with torrent files. Ugh.

The good news however is that most of the Top Gear episodes are once again availabe for download. There are some that I didn’t have a torrent for (so I could edit and reupload it), so those are temporarily offline, but the majority of the new Top Gear episodes are online.

Sorry it took so long and I’ll try to get to reuploading the missing Top Gear torrents and all of the Fifth Gear torrents in a couple days or so once I not so sick of dealing with torrents and the site. ;)

And for those who missed the news post as to why all of the torrents got removed from Mininova, then check out this news post.

If you’re in Miami, Florida, want to help out Top Gear, and either are a Camaro expert or know one, then check out this thread ASAP.

EDIT @ 2AM on 6/21: Whoops, I made the update on the backup nameserver rather than the primary one. All has been fixed now. :)

Since our usual tracker is down for an overhaul, Mininova pruned a ton of our torrents (again). I just pointed tracker.finalgear.com at our backup tracker in an attempt to save any remaining torrents on Mininova, but from what I hear, most got pruned.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last couple days formatting and playing with Vista and such and I’m still not fully back up. Tomorrow or Thursday though, I should have all my programs installed again, so I’ll go through again and reupload any torrents that got pruned.

Sorry for any inconvience.

A member of our forum was kind enough to make torrents for each of the seasons of Top Gear. Since I’m a lazy SOB and have yet to add torrents for episodes from before we started our site, this is a good opportunity to get your hands on some old episodes. :)

If you’re interested, just head on over to Mininova.

First, here is Sunday’s Top Gear. Vuk grabbed tonight’s re-airing of it without a hitch.

Second, due to the dang World Cup, Top Gear is going on break for a month or so. Check out the top of the site for the countdown until the next episode.

A bit of a late release today as Vuk had to work, but it’s finally here. Enjoy. :)

Vuk recorded the episode, but the intro was corrupted. Since it was corrupted, we couldn’t go ahead with the encode. Most likely that file wasn’t going to to be released anyway. He’s going to grab the re-air tomorrow Tuesday, so we’ll have the ep then. Sorry :/

Edit by Viper: For those who can’t wait for Vuk’s capture of the re-airing, you can find a 700MB scene group rip over on Mininova (here and here).

As many of you have noticed, both of the trackers that we use are currently having issues.

Our primary tracker is hosted on a home connection and due to the sheer number of users downloading Top Gear and such, it’s maxxed out the connection’s upload. Before a week or two ago, this had never been a problem. We will keep using this tracker, but we may end up switching to using a different tracker as our primary.

Our backup tracker appears to be down and has been like this for a day or two. Modern BitTorrent clients would normally switch to using this tracker if the main one was down/unavailable, but this one is down as well, so…

Update 6/3 1:30AM: The backup tracker is now back online. It just required a reboot. :)

Until one or both are up/available again, please use a modern BitTorrent client like uTorrent or Azureus. Both have a feature called DHT that will allow you to use torrents even when it’s tracker(s) are unavailable.

Apologies for these issues and hopefully they will be resolved soon. :)