Our contact form has apparently been broken since January 9th or shortly thereafter. I had just figured no one wanted to e-mail me, lol.

So simply put, if you e-mailed me via our contact form during the past 2 months, I never got it and the e-mail is unrecoverable. Sorry, but you can always e-mail me again now that the form is working. ;)

Our site, forums, wiki, etc. will all be offline for 3 to 5 hours starting at 2PM GMT this Saturday. Our collocation center, FDC, will be doing power upgrades and fixes. As usual, if you’re bored and left without anything to do during that time period, you can always join us in our IRC channel if you have an IRC client such as mIRC or ChatZilla for Firefox.

We are looking for new co-location due to our current host’s mis-interpretation of copyright law and false reports by the ESA.

We need 5U of space for 2 servers, preferably in the US, with 2TB of bandwidth/month. We are fully compliant with the United States DMCA and International Copyright Laws. Send us an offer or any questions to hostingoffers @ finalgear.com .

Thanks!

In other news, our IRC server is down, but that’s unrelated. We’re hanging out at #gear on irc.chatsociety.net meanwhile. Our IRC server is back up!

Seems the sever decided to take a total crap. Took us quite a while to actually get into the server and then even more time to fix MySQL which was heavily broken. All should be well now though. Sorry about that.

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. :)

There’s just under 12 hours to go until Top Gear returns for an all new season! Join us on our forums or our IRC chat channel as we countdown the hours!

But please, no asking when a rip of the show will be out. We’ll do our best to get it out as soon as possible and asking will not make it go any quicker. Thanks.

If you’d like to automatically download the rip as soon as it’s out, add our torrent RSS feed to your BitTorrent client. Help and instructions can be found in this forum thread.

With the 24 Hours of LeMons race having started a few hours ago at the Flat Rock Speedway in Michigan, Team FinalGear is doing well in the black BMW. What race? Well, read all about it on the forums, as most of you must’ve already. And if not, where have you been?!

So far Quiky and Serajadeyn have been racing for 5 hours with 400 laps in the BMW, best position was 12th and they are currently 19th.

FliPP has posted some pictures and videos taken today from his visit to the track.

As always there is the FinalGear chat with both drivers making guest appearances from the track side whenever they can!

Thanks to all the sponsors and donations that helped get us this far. Good Luck to both our drivers for the remainder of the race.

Yes, thats right, we are in the 24 Hours of Lemons! More specifically, we are in for the Flat Rock Speedway on September 29th/30th. I (Quiky), Serajadeyn, and a few other drivers are in the race with a very fancy / beatup car.

Presenting our… 1993 BMW 525i!

So here is the catch — we are asking for sponsors to help cover some of the car costs like a rollcage, safety belts, fire extinguisher, tires, brakes, traveling cost from MD to Michigan, etc. If you donate, we’ll even stick your name/logo/website name/graphic of choice (non-pornographic please) on the car!

Details can be found on our forums.

Whoops. The server we had been using to serve the site’s images was taken down at the end of last month (we cancelled it to save bills) and I missed a few references to the old URL. I think all HTML/CSS has been changed now though to point towards the new image server. Sorry about those red X’s, but it should be all better now.

On a side note, the colocation our servers are currently hosted in apparently has the worst power supplies in the world. So if you are unable to reach the site for a bit, you know what to blame. Things will be better after we move at the end of the month.

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.