Various news sites are totally blowing a small accident Richard had over the weekend in the Britcar 24 hour race at Silverstone out of proportion. Don’t fret — it was just a small collision he had with another car. Things like that happen during racing. They are just hyping it up to sell more papers and such.

That’s right, those lucky bastards down in Australia are going to be able to see the MPH show themselves, a car show / live Top Gear thingy hosted by Clarkson, Richard, and James reports GoAuto.com.au. It will be sometime within the next 18 months according to the article.

The old mailing list plugin we used here hasn’t sent out an e-mail in months, so I finally gave up trying to fix it and switched to just having FeedBurner (a Google-owned company) handle our mailing list. However, because they don’t have an import feature, you will need to resubscribe if you had been previously subscribed. The form can be found to the right, just under the show banners.

FeedBurner’s service, for better or worse, also only sends out daily digests. If you want near-instant notifications of new posts here, I suggest you use our news feed which is also hosted by FeedBurner. It’s better for that kind of thing anyway.

And while on the subject of feeds, until today, we had four different news feeds — one in RSS2, one in RSS, one in Atom, and one in RDF. That was rather messy, so I’ve merged them all into one feed using one of FeedBurner’s services that will convert the feed on the fly into whatever format your feed reader can accept. If this is causing issues for you or your reader, please let me know.

I was a little slow today, but the episode is now out.

For those who don’t remember or weren’t around at the time, shortly after Richard’s crash in the dragster, we collected donations and used them to buy a helmet and have it custom painted just for Richard. It took a while, but we finally got it to him earlier this year (full backstory there as well).

In an upcoming episode of Top Gear, Richard will be using a Bugatti Veyron for a segment (I won’t spoil why, but it’s pretty damn cool). Photos have emerged online of him in the car and he just happens to be wearing a familiar helmet.

Sweet, huh? I’m giddy with pride. More photos and discussion right here.

Photos of our helmet after the jump »

Yes, they’re nearly 10 hours in, but I still thought I’d post some helpful links for you not living within watching distance of the race.

And remember, if you don’t want to know what’s happening and want to wait for it to air on Top Gear, don’t click any of these links. ;)

• Live Timing — “Team Top Gear”, car #78
• Live audio stream via 0157 Globecast Radio and Radio LeMans

If you’d like to discuss the race, our IRC channel and this forum thread are the places to do it.

As you probably know, Top Gear is at Silverstone from today through Sunday. Well, ArosaMike from our forums managed to get in on Thursday during the practice sessions and snap some great photos of The / A Stig as well as Clarkson behind the wheel. You might want to check them out if you don’t mind spoilers.

GQ, a popular men’s magazine, has voted Richard their TV personality of the year. Congratulations, Richard!

… and you can snag the episode right here.