Stupid snooker. Let it never take away our beloved Top Gear again.

Seems Britain switched back to GMT and no one told me they weren’t on DST anymore, so the countdown was an hour fast. Top Gear has just begun airing now, not just finished as the countdown has said until just a few moments ago.

TopGear.com has some in-studio photos of Sunday’s episode as well as an article and photos of the totally awesome race in which Hammond wears our helmet.

Both are worth checking out.

After you guys literally made the server come to a crawl on the first two Sundays of this month, Quiky decided it was time for an upgrade.

The old box was a single Xeon 3.0GHz with 4GB of RAM on Windows 2003. Once we got past about the 600 users on the forums and probably tons more on the main site, things would start breaking as some of you may noticed earlier this month.

Well, this should happen no longer (hopefully, lol) due to our new server, named “Titan”, which should be something like 10x as fast. It’s rocking 4 dual-core AMD Opteron 8220 processors (yes, that’s 8 cores total) with 16GB of RAM on Ubuntu (yay, no more Windows!).

Simply put, it’s badass. Enjoy the new, lightning quick page serve times. :)

TopGear.com has some unseen footage of Jeremy driving in the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera on the Col de Torini cut from the first episode of this season. While the steaming video quality isn’t all that great, the soundtrack of the Gallardo’s exhaust is to die for.

It’s been known for a while now that you’ll be able to watch Top Gear episodes ingame in Gran Turismo 5 (40 episodes infact), but we’ve just learned today that you’ll also be able to drive the Top Gear test track!

“We at Polyphony are great fans of the world’s best motoring programme, Top Gear, so we’re delighted to be collaborating with BBC Worldwide to deliver Top Gear content via Gran Turismo,” said Kazunori Yamauchi, President, Polyphony Digital, “We’re sure that players will be as thrilled as we are when they get the chance to put their own driving skills to the test on the Top Gear Test Track in GT5, as well as enjoying classic episodes of Top Gear via GT TV.”

UPDATE: I’ve added two screenshots of the ingame Top Gear videos taken from TopGear.com.

A few people have sent me this over the past day, so I guess I should front page it.

Ultima Sports Ltd, who claims Top Gear has refused “repeated approaches” from them to test their car, took their GTR720 street legal car out onto the Top Gear test track on their own and set a lap time of 1:12.8, beating the Koenigsegg CXX (with spoiler) time of 1:17.6.

Of course it’s “unofficial” as the Stig didn’t drive it, but it’s still the same track and all that, so it’s impressive nonetheless.

Details including more pictures and some videos can be found at Ultima’s site.

Yep, the last episode of the season is out now. Based on previous years, Fifth Gear will be back sometime in March or April.

EDIT: According to the Fifth Gear website, they’ll be back at the end of January, much sooner than expected!

As mentioned earlier, there’s no Top Gear airing today due to snooker being on. It’ll be back next Sunday.

RiVER caught the re-airing of Fifth Gear and finally released a rip of the episode. You can snag a torrent for it right here.