Top Gear Live
I Went to Top Gear Live yesterday out at Acer Arena, Homebush Bay (Olympic Park), Sydney.
We took the train in which was surprisingly fast and only 1-2 minutes late at most stops, the bad part was that of the 6 trains we caught yesterday only 1 had air conditioning and this was the last one we caught being later in the evening when it was cooler (it was a snug 32-33 all day…. yay!).
We stopped off at The Brewery out at Homebush and had a Beer while watching a bit of the cricket (we got to Homebush just over an hour early….), we then enjoyed a great Lamb Sandwich while walking over to the Performance and Prestige show outside of Acer.
The Prestige and Performance show was pretty cool, there were 2 F1 cars (previous seasons of course 
) which can been seen in the Photos to the right of this post as well as heaps of V8s and European Sports Cars. I’m a big fan of the Audi R8 and the Aston Martin Vanquish so i was very happy to see both of these cars make a showing! Unfortunately the picture i took of the R8 was ruined (it’s just a giant white flash…) but i got the Astons and the Ferraris so i guess it’s not that bad.
I have a couple of movies from the show which i will upload when i get SSH installed on my iPhone (not hard just a pain…) which contain most of the things missing from the pictures.
The show itself was great, it was a bit strange having some live advertisements at the start from Audi, Garman and Alfa but those were quickly over. The show started with Jeremy and Richard driving on to the floor in and R8 and a Gallardo then introducing Steve Pizzati who was filling in for James May who could not be there (and was not the butt of all jokes).
They did a few cool things with precision driving and bikes at the start, they then moved on to what i thought was pretty interesting where they got the Audience to do the cool wall (must have been a predominantly Holden audience because the Holden Ute received Cool status and the Ford Ute was Uncool…) with these red and green cards which were held up and processed through an image recognition system in real time to calculate the votes, this system was also used later in the show to complete a virtual lap of the Top Gear UK test track which the audience came about middle of the pack for in terms of ‘overall’ ranking.
The show concluded with The Stig throwing a Lotus Elise around the arena while being ‘pursued’ by an Apache helicopter (as seen in an Episode of Top Gear UK). The the ’3D’ graphic of the helicopter coupled with the cardboard glasses was underwhelming but the driving was excellent.
Overall it was definitely worth the price of admission, i was a bit miffed i didn’t get a go on the F1 Simulators but i doubt it’d be a huge difference to playing at the arcade for a couple of dollars.
I’ll get the videos up soonish!