That’s right, once again we’ll be competing in The 24 Hours of LeMons, an endurance race featuring lemon cars costing $500 or less.

However, our team needs sponsors — people like you! Donating not all that much will get your name or company on the car and help propel our team to victory! Full details for what your donation size will get you can be found on our forums.

After the huge success of the first Melbourne meet, our Australian forum members have decided to have another one. It will on May 4th and will take place in Gippsland. Anyone and everyone are welcome to come and details can be found on our forums.

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 have now set up a wiki to help aggregate all of the information about Top Gear, Fifth Gear, etc. Feel free to make constructive edits and contributions to it, but please, follow the existing guidelines and templates.

We are not looking to re-invent the wheel and simply make a copy of the Wikipedia articles on Top Gear, Fifth Gear, car models, etc. We are however looking to create strong guides on specific episodes and things like that. Wikipedia is a great generic resource, but we are trying to be of a more niche resource concentrating on things Wikipedia doesn’t cover.

If you have any questions, ask them on our forums before editing. Thanks!

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.

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.

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.