Top Gear Pits V8 Supercar Against Stunt Plane, Komatsu Tractor

10 years, 1 month ago - 18 September 2014, Autoblog

Traditional motorsports pit a bunch of roughly equivalent vehicles over a course to find out which driver has the most skill and which car has the right tweaks to score a victory against the competitors.

But Top Gear is anything but old fashioned. It decided to stage two very different kinds of races to see how things went during the Top Gear Festival Sydney.

The first race of this video has Australian V8 Supercars champion Jamie Whincup in a Holden competing against a stunt plane. Unfortunately, even the hosts admit that the stunt doesn't quite go as expected, but it all looks pretty good as everything goes wrong.

The next competition probably goes closer to plan as Whincup lines up alongside James "Captain Slow" May in a Komatsu front-end loader. Obviously, the heads-up race would never work; so the challenge is much simpler. May just has to drive the 1,970 feet (600 meters) to the finish line faster than the V8 Supercar laps the whole 1.74-mile (2.8-km) track. Whincup manages some impressive drifts during his lap. Check out the video to see who wins the two challenges.