The 10th episode of the second season has finally arrived, entitled “Breaking, Badly” it features a main segment where the boys – Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May – attempt to build an amphibious vehicle capable of breaking the British amphibious vehicle speed record.
But before that ensues, Clarkson begins the episode with a look into the supercar past as he compares the 1992 Jaguar XJ220 with the 1993 Bugatti EB 110 SS – essentially coming to the conclusion that the cars were fast for their time but rather slow by today’s standards [at least when it involves going around corners and braking and anything else but speed in a straight line].
Conversation Street topics this week varied between the new BMW Z4 [with Jeremy embarking on a side bit about how men and women differ in the removal processes of their “jumpers”], the new Toyota Supra, the new Rimac Concept Two, the new McLaren Senna and finally, the long-ignored topic of bird speeds.
From there, we returned to the main segment which featured Jeremy as the project leader and his idea to come up with a jet engine [from an old Soviet-era fighter jet] attached to an old Suzuki with boats parts attached to it. The jet engine testing blew over some innocently parked planes before the trio took it to the water where it achieved the whopping speed of 3 miles per hour. [But the best part of the test was when Jeremy started up the jet engine, prompting James to say “Don’t look at it!”]
Celebrity Face-Off briefly intervened with a magician theme this week as the well-known USA magician duo of Penn & Teller took on the British magician named Dynamo. Each performed a few tricks before Penn & Teller won the snowy/slushy race on the track with the Jaguar.
The return to the main segment found Jeremy sacked as project leader, replaced by James and Richard, who had the idea to get a 1970s three-wheeler Bond Bug [described by Jeremy, not inaccurately, as “a Reliant Robin in a 1970s leisure suit”] and marry it with the engine of a jet-ski – a creation they christened as the Pond Bug. The Pond Bug then had to be piloted by Jeremy [who was the only one of the trio with a proper boating license] and he drove it to a new British amphibious vehicle speed record of 47.81 miles per, breaking the old record of 39.1 miles per hour.
Overall, this was an improvement from last week and one of the better episodes of the series so far, ASN awards the episode a 90 out of 100.