Since the previous two sets of T-shirts were so successful, we’ve decided to do some more designs.

As like before, it’ll be a contest where anyone and everyone can submit their ideas for a design. Winners will get a free shirt or two, some swag, and major props and gratitude.

If you’re interested in entering, you can find the full contest details on our forums.

Garage419 will be returning this Saturday. They’ll be participating in the 2009 BullRun Rally from New York City to Austin, Texas and will be posting a new episode from the road every night as well as tweeting their progress. They’ll be participating in a 2010 Ford F-150 SVT Raptor, a street legal Baja truck:

Since we host Garage419′s official forums, we thought this would be a good opportunity to have a mini-meetup of FinalGear’ers. So if you’re in the New York City area and aren’t doing anything this Saturday morning, please consider showing up at the Hotel Gansevoort to meet the Garage419 gang and fellow FinalGear’ers. UPDATE: Be there by 8:30am!

Details and discussion can be found at this forum thread.

You guys sure love your Top Gear, don’t you? We managed to break our server today due to the metric assload of traffic (we broke all of our old traffic records, even with the downtime), but PacketCollision and Quiky managed to sort it all out, we hope.

So apologies for the downtime, but we should hopefully be good from here on out. Now go watch Top Gear — it was a great episode!

UPDATE: Things are looking quite good. The drop in traffic plus the tweaked server settings seems to have done the trick. Oh, and for future reference — if the site ever goes down again, make sure to check the site’s Twitter account as I’ll post status updates there.

Yes, we’re going LeMons racing yet again!

This year we’ll be entering a car in the Garrettsville, Ohio race at the Nelson Ledges Road Course. It will be a true 24 hour race rather than the more common two 12 hour races. We’re also turning into a FinalGear meet, so we hope to see you there! All the details about the day and a sneak peek at our car this year can be found on our forums.

I’m proud to announce that a little over 24 hours ago, our forums passed the one million post mark! Thanks to everyone who has participated on our forums. To the rest of you, I hope to see you help us toward the two million mark. There’s lots of great stuff on our forums including stuff in future Top Gear episodes that I don’t post on the front page (as many people don’t like spoilers).

You may or may not have heard of Garage419. For those who haven’t, they’re an online automotive review show. Here’s a one of their episodes:

Anyway, until now they’ve relied on YouTube comments and their own video commenting system to gather feedback from their viewers. However they recently approached us with a proposal for us to host their forums. They’re big fans of our site and especially our forums and were looking for an existing community to become a part of. We happily agreed as this means more exposure for us via promotions on their site and in their videos and it benefits them too by spreading the word about their great little series.

So, starting today, you can discuss their episodes, make episode suggestions, and more all via a new section on our forums.

If you tried to contact me over the past week, your e-mail didn’t come through. Please resend it. It didn’t occur to me that our e-mail wasn’t working due to the server issues, otherwise I would have disabled the form and posted a message saying why.

Just re-send your message now and I’ll get it.

Just a quick note saying everything is back to normal server wise as of a day or two ago. Nice and fast as before (if not faster). Thanks for your patience during the past week.

This is just a quick note to let you know that the site (including the forums) may be offline sporadically over the next couple days. One of the hard drives on our server failed, so we’re only running off one drive at the moment. Backups are currently taking place and we’re moving the site and/or forums to temporary hosting until the new drives arrive on Tuesday. We’ll then reload everything on the server (might as well since it’ll be offline for the drive swap) and we should be fully back online on Tuesday or Wednesday.

During our downtimes (or anytime really), feel free to join us in our IRC channel: #gear on irc.finalgear.com. If you don’t have an IRC client such as Chatzilla, you can connect using Mibbit (bookmark that link).

Thanks for being patient and for using FinalGear.com.

That’s right, the Spring 2009 FinalGear shirts are available for purchase!

The shirts ship international starting on April 26th, and are $16 each+shipping. Check this forum thread for details.