Nothing makes me happier and more honored than when the people behind the cameras think enough of this site to visit it themselves, especially when it’s Top Gear’s producer, Andy Wilman.

Yet you never really get a sense of whether you’ve pulled it off until you’re at home watching it on the box at the same time as everybody else.

Afterwards I made my usual masochistic trip to the computer and logged on to Final Gear to see what our harshest, fairest, sharpest and most loyal critics had to say. I love the spirit of that gang, and they are superb at spotting where you’ve made a horlicks of things, but they seemed to like this one.

If only they’d known what a bitch it was to make. We came back from the Pole with over 180 hours of rushes to condense into one hour, and after about three weeks in the edit we started to go a bit mental.

Andy, I think I speak for all of us when I say well done, mate. Wednesday’s episode was just staggeringly awesome. Keep up the awesome work.

You can read the rest of Andy’s article at TopGear.com.

When I started this site in the fall of 2003, never in a million years would I have guessed that any of the people involved in Top Gear production would know about it let alone visit it.

Well today, Top Gear’s Executive Producer Andy Wilman revealed on the TopGear.com blog that he is a usual reader of our forums. At the end of his article about this Sunday’s US special is this:

Personally, the American film is one of my favourites because it’s such a charmer, but I’m 44, so we’ll see. Whatever happens, I will as usual be logging onto our mates at Final Gear on Monday for a masochistic kicking.

It makes me very happy that the Top Gear production team value viewer responses and use our humble little forums as a resource. I’m such a proud daddy.

There’s a discussion on our forums if you want to chime in on this.