4. Road Works In 24 Hours
If there's anything that all motorists hate, from learners to petrol heads, even passengers, it has to be roadworks. Mostly because whenever you drive by them (having waited five whole minutes for the other lane to drive by them first), you can only see lots of cones and barriers, maybe a hole, but no one actually working there. Or at all. They always seem to go on far longer than they need to, and so in series 9, Top Gear set out to change this. In what is possibly the one single challenge that contained the biggest combination of ambition, relevance, and actual practicality, the Top Gear crew attempted to "close the road, slap some new tarmac on it, tell the health and safety people to get stuffed, and get the damned thing open as quickly as possible". Of course the Clarkson method of getting things done properly involved a road crew more than twice the usual size, no tea breaks but as many berries from the hedges as the crew wanted (although dinner did come courtesy of a take away order for cod and chips, 75 times), and using Margaret Thatcher speeches for motivation. And of course this was accompanied by May's 'diversion', which saw him apparently having to ask the local shop keepers where he should send the traffic. Admittedly that doesn't sound very practical in the real world, but one thing that was highlighted was that the biggest delay to roadworks being completed quicker, was the slow transportation of the tarmac to the road. Something which is added to by the nearest tarmac quarry clocking off at 5pm. Eventually though, the resurfacing of the road was complete, in true Top Gear style. Quickly, but not very efficiently.