Top Gear — Season 17

The Skoda Trophy, the Lada Challenge, the Astra-Nova Challenge — some of the championships where car manufacturers support would-be works rally drivers; William Woollard evaluates the schemes on offer. Frank Page has been to Hungary to drive the latest version of such models as the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit and Bentley Turbo R. Just after the Second World War, Britain produced the Jowett Javelin — then one of the most advanced cars you could buy. Sue Baker talks to the car’s designer 40 years on and examines why such promise turned sour. And the Highway Code. Chris Goffey investigates aspects of this quasi-legal charter for drivers.

In the last of the series, as a celebration of summer William Woollard, Sue Baker, Chris Goffey and Frank Page take to the hills of North Wales in four British designed and built sports cars, to try and recapture the lost joys of ‘wind in the hair’ motoring. Chris Goffey brings us up to date with the fortunes of Chris Goodwin and the other novice racing drivers from the first programme of the series, with a report from Oulton Park on the sixth round of the Cellnet Formula First Championship. Does the MOT test, first introduced in 1960, still serve a useful purpose? Sue Baker tries to find out how sure you can be that a car carrying an MOT certificate is, in fact, safe to be on the road. William Woollard road tests what’s claimed to be Britain’s first motor car, the 1894 Santler, and asks which eight cars would be voted the 20th century’s ‘cars of the decade’.