The Red Monkey

Top Gear America’s Reasonably Price Car outed as Suzuki SX4

by Jeremy Korzeniewski (RSS feed) on Oct 19th 2010 at 2:58PM

Here in the good ‘ole United States of America, we like things big… and small. Over in UK, they can have their reasonably priced cars, we don’t need ‘em. We’re putting a Big Star in a Small Car instead.

Naturally, the premise is the same. Take one name-brand celebrity and place them behind the wheel of a run-of-the-mill car available to the masses here in America and send them around a makeshift race track. While the British version of Top Gear currently uses a Kia Cee’d for star-shuttling duty, America’s TG spin-off will feature a Suzuki SX4.

For what it’s worth, we had a couple of guys in the audience during the taping of the U.S. show’s first episode and we had signed statements restricting us from publishing this information. Apparently, though, it’s been leaked by either someone at Top Gear or by Suzuki.

In any case, we genuinely like Suzuki’s little runabout. It’s not particularly fast, but it’s an able handler and it has the beans to pull itself around a track quickly enough. Plus, it’s pretty reasonably priced… not that we care, of course. And, as you’d expect from any show that carries the name Top Gear, there will indeed be an American Stig. Current internet rumormongering suggests that F1-ace Rubens Barrichello is the American Stig, but that hasn’t been, nor is it likely to be, officially confirmed.

In related news, some of the American stars that will be piloting the SX4 include Tim Allen, Buzz Aldrin, Ty Burrell, Tony Hawk, Bret Michaels, Dominic Monaghan, Kid Rock and Michelle Rodriguez. Suitably big stars?

[Source: Variety]