I was the first to arrive in a car from my era, the superb Jensen Healey.
This is a beauty.
Built by Jensen,
designed by the father-and-son team that brought us the Healey 3-litre,
styled by the same man who did the Aston Martin Lagonda
and powered by a twin-cam Lotus engine.
You really can think of this, then,
as being like one of those old '70s supergroups,
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
Will Young, but...
Oh, 'ey up. Here we go. Speak of the devil.
James, that is magnificent!
-A TVR-S from your period. -It is.
-It's the TVR S2, actually. -S2?
Yeah, 170 horsepower, Cologne Ford V6 from Granada.
Absolutely. No, this was superb.
And the other thing about these... Can you open the boot?
Yes. Yes, I can.
You know on the Antiques Roadshow, they always look behind the clock face
and they can tell who made it.
-Oh, the maker's mark, yeah, yeah. -Yeah.
Well, normally on a TVR,
if you look underneath the carpets, or the roof lining or something like that,
you often find a clue as to who built the car.
-Have you got something? -Yes. There you go.
-This was made by a man called... -Nobby?
Nobby, I think. Yes, Nobby.
You just don't get that on a...
-On a Golf, say. -Or a Ferrari. No.
As we admired our wonderful cars...
Richard arrived in a little gem from his youth, a Lotus Elan.
Oh, yes!
It's come back. It's come home!
Yep, it has. It's a poetic moment, actually.
The last Elan, here back at Lotus.
-That's terrific. -It is.
I remember when this came out, that square stance it had.
-Nobody had built a square car before. -No, nobody had done that.
It was... Yeah, there were reasons for that.
The plastic used to shrink and they didn't know
that the suppliers had come up with a new plastic
that didn't shrink. So it was wider than expected.
This is ingenuity, making the best of it. It was the same, the TV, plastic.
Plastic. There's something, plastic body.
-And the engine in this wasn't Lotus. -No, it's Isuzu.
But that's Japanese, reliable. When they tested one of these,
they ran it round a racetrack for 24 hours straight and for 22 of those hours,
-it didn't break down. -Seriously?
As we chatted, a challenge arrived.
You read it, Hammond.
"You will now race around the Lotus test track
to see which of your ridiculous cars is best..."
-Ridiculous? Steady on. -It actually says "ridiculous".
It goes on. "And then you must put the Stig in a car
that wiped your British sports cars off the map,
a Peugeot 205 GTI, and set a time."
What, he seriously thinks a crummy little French hatchback
can beat these purpose-built cars?
-Have we got to get the Peugeot? -It says we've got to put him in it, yes.
First, though, we did some laps in our classic British sports cars.
Oh, that this is a stirring scene, three great British sports cars
haring across the British landscape.
I love the sound of a twin-cam.
It's engine noise you're hearing, not tricked up...
That's not... Oh, deary me.
There we go!
Yes! I knew there'd be one there if I looked hard enough.
This car is, of course, very light.
It weighs just 987 kilograms because it's made from canoe-building materials.
Sorry, scrap that. Because it's made from composites.
Critically, the Elan is front-wheel drive, because it's just better.
At the same time this car was coming out,
Mazda were bringing out the MX-5, rear-wheel drive, old-fashioned.
As a result, the MX-5 never really caught on.
I mean it sold in massive numbers for decades,
but it didn't have the same exclusivity that the Elan did,
which never sold in the same vulgar, brash numbers.
Sometimes with this engine,
you do notice that the oil pressure could drop alarmingly in a fast corner.
It's okay. The engine would never blow up,
because normally the water pump would go first.
A very useful feature, that.
When you press the throttle in the TVR, there is a slight delay
before anything happens. A lot of people thought this was a fault,
but actually it's a very innovative safety feature.
I'll demonstrate.
You're driving along, you press the throttle, the car says: "Are you sure?
"Oh, all right, then."
Look at that TVR in my mirror. And that Jensen, cornering so flat.
A little bit of history for you.
After the Second World War, which we won,
Britain was littered with disused airfields,
and many of them, like this one, in fact, were converted into racetracks.
And it was on these twisting, turning racetracks
that the lightweight, nimble British sports car
was sort of developed and honed.
We could have gone round all day.
But the producers said we must pull in and post our lap times.
The time has come, Hammond, would you reveal your fastest lap?
My fastest lap in my Lotus Elan was 2:09. Blistering.
-That is. There's no other word. -It is.
-Blistering. James. -It felt right here.
TVR S2, my fastest lap time was 2:15.9.
2:15.9. And here, the 1970s Jensen Healey, 2:17.9.
So what we can see here is progress.
As you'd expect from the British sports car industry.
That's very good. That's even better...
The cars have come on, decade by decade.
And now it's time to find out how fast
the Stig can go round in this Peugeot 205 GTI.
-It doesn't look like a GTI. -No, I couldn't get a GTI.
So I got a diesel. They're basically the same.
-Same thing, pretty much. -Okay, Stig, start it up.
The Stig wound up the Peugeot and began his flying lap.
-Here we go, and... go! -Timing!
Okay, we're off.
I think the reason I couldn't get a GTI, I suspect,
is because they've all rusted away, or been crashed, or fallen to pieces.
The handling was terrible on those. They were crashed a lot.
-Any faults with your car? -No.
Any faults with yours?
No. Did you know, in the whole history of TVR, there is
no recorded incident of one ever breaking down?
I've heard that.
And here he comes.
-Yes! -2:09, 2:15, 2:17 for us.
-2:22.0. -Point, I think, proven.
We don't need to go on.