The servers that this site and it’s forums are usually on are in the process of moving. They’ll be shipped cross-country tomorrow and hopefully will be installed soon.

Meanwhile, the site and forums are on two separate, less powerful backup boxes and as a result, you may notice slightly slower page load times. Apologies, but it’s only temporary.

The previously discussed Nürburgring meet is now scheduled for May 20th. If you are going to be anywhere near the ‘Ring then and would like to come, please post in this thread on our forums where you can also find more details on the meet.

The countdown has begun — Fifth Gear will be back on April 30th at 8PM UK time. Let’s hope this season is better than the last…

Okay, so apparently (and thankfully) Top Gear will be back sometime this fall.

Jeremy Clarkson has confirmed he will be returning to front a new series of Top Gear.

The TV presenter, 46, left the future of the BBC2 show in doubt last week after telling viewers there would “not be a new series”.

But last night he said: “Everyone seems to think the programme is finished or that I’ve left.

“Well, sorry to disappoint you all but it isn’t and I haven’t. Top Gear… will be back in the autumn.”

Source: The Sunday Mirror

I had been holding off on posting about all of this until we were able to confirm all of the following, but it seems like this just isn’t going to happen for at least a while, so I’ve decided to just go ahead and post what we’re heard.

Apparently the BBC’s lease on Dunsfold, the track / airstrip where Top Gear is filmed, is up and they will be unable to renew it as developers are planning on turning it into a housing development. This of course means that Top Gear will have to move to another location.

There also has been word by Clarkson in his column that Top Gear won’t be back at all (the BBC denies this), but we don’t know if he’s saying this to try to get more money in his contract negotiations that are supposedly going on or if this is really the case.

Simply put, there’s a lot of rumors and such going on, so we don’t know anything for sure, but when we do, we’ll make sure to let you all know.

And as always, if you have news tips, please let us know.

Sorry for not posting this yesterday, but I didn’t even know it had aired (the drawback of not living in the UK and not paying close enough attention to our forums, lol).

From the Wikipedia article on the show for those of you who like me, had never heard of Comic Relief or “Top of the Pops”:

Top Gear of The Pops is one off special Top Gear programme made as part of the Comic Relief 2007 appeal. It blended the usual segments of Top Gear with elements of Top of the Pops, the music chart show that was cancelled in 2006.

You can find a torrent for the half hour show on Mininova.

Starting on March 26th, we will be shipping the two servers that this site currently runs on from San Fransisco to Pennsylvania as we are switching hosting centers. The main site will be temporarily hosted on the old front end server in San Fransisco while the other two are in transit and being set back up. The forums will be either hosted on our static file server in the Netherlands or on another server run off a high capacity cable connection. We haven’t decided which yet.

But anyway, during this week or so of moving and setting up, we may have downtime from time to time, but we will do our best to ensure that the site and forums are as normal as possible.

Thanks for using FinalGear.com. :)

LadyBella was kind enough to post the following Dutch promo video on our forums:

Of course we don’t know if that’s truely the Stig or even if only one person plays the Stig, but this is still a very interesting development.

A discussion on this is currently taking place in this thread — feel free to weigh in.

The last episode of this season aired today and you can download it now. Top Gear will be back sometime this summer, but look forward to a special in a couple weeks.

If you’d like to download the 700MB scene rip, you can find that here.