CarAdvice.com.au is reporting that Top Gear Australia will be back May 11th. I’ve updated the counter at the top of the site to reflect the new date.

CarAdvice.com.au has the very 1990′s-style “Behind The Wheel” pilot, an Australian automotive TV show hosted by the new Top Gear Australia host, James Morrison. This was long before Top Gear came to Australia (I assume) and long before the current format of Top Gear.

Here’s the first part, the other 2 parts are at their site.

If you ignore the 90′s-ness of it, he’s actually not half bad.

TV Tonight is reporting that Charlie Cox will be replaced by musician James Morrison for the second season of Top Gear Australia. You might remember Morrison as the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car in episode six.

The change was supposedly due to Charlie Cox having too many media and business commitments.

“My time on Top Gear Australia was very special and it was a fantastic opportunity to be part of launching an extraordinary series. Sadly, though, I’ve lived in the UK for the past 19 years and I’m not able to give the time I want to Series Two. It seems best to leave the show and I wish James all the best in joining the two best blokes in Australian television -Warren Brown and Steve Pizzati,” Cox said.

Thanks to Neerav Bhatt for the tip via Twitter.

The Australian portal of TopGear.com launched today. It has videos and umm, stuff. Actually it’s just a lot like the UK version but with less videos and more Australian-specific stuff. No mention of the Australian version of the show from what I can tell.

Looks like the Aussie Scene groups missed it or are having upload trouble as it’s currently over an hour late. Hopefully it shows up later today. If not, we’ll look into alternate rips.

Thanks for your patience.

Totally forgot there were only 8 episodes this season. I’ll blame this post on it being 4:30 AM where I am and that I’ve been doing Top Gear Australia for the past 2 months now (it became a habit). Sorry about that.

Here is the last episode of the first season of Top Gear Australia. Mininova is currently down due to server troubles, so the torrent is hosted on The Pirate Bay. I’ll stick it on Mininova later today once they’re back up. Mininova is back up. Link changed to Mininova.

And incase anyone’s wondering why we even bother using Mininova and don’t just host the .torrent files themselves, it’s because most hosts frown upon it. Even though BitTorrent and .torrent files themselves are perfectly legal (what you download via them of course can vary in legality), hosts just don’t want the trouble. So hosting them offsite is a (usually) great solution.

It took some string pulling and a lot of work to get a copy of it, but Monday’s Top Gear Australia is now available for download.

A rip has been put out by PiX, but I haven’t managed to get my hands on it yet. There are a few x264 rips out there, but I don’t want to use those as I’d have to walk a million people through the codecs.

Just be patient and go watch Top Gear 12×02 again or something meanwhile.

Okay, so it may not be as good as the UK version, but it’s still worth a watch. You can grab the 6th episode right here.

BiA’s 550MB rip of Top Gear Australia 01×05 is now available. Expect a 700MB release later this week probably.

EDIT: Or maybe not. No sign of a 700MB release. Sorry.