'Top Gear' Season 28 Episode 4: Bummer ending for Flintoff and Harris after suiting up for the brutal Baja 1000
Spoilers for 'Top Gear' Season 28 Episode 4
Racing on tracks is always exhilarating. The experience feels a lot better when the car is the right on. It becomes doubly better when the machine listens to your every command. If last year's blockbuster 'Ford vs Ferrari' gave the audience a look at the grueling 24-Hour Le Mans, this episode of 'Top Gear' provides an in-depth look at the Baja 1000, a 24-hour race across 800 miles of rough terrain in Mexico. Chris Harris and Freddie Flintoff enthusiastically take part in a race only for them to end up in dire straits.
The Baja 1000 is quite a visual treat. Insanely jacked-up trucks with some state-of-the-art controls zoom and vroom against each other in a race where finishing it is more important than winning. Finishing the race earns more respect and that's exactly what the duo hopes for. The team captain the producers hook them up with make an alarming statement pretty early in the series — "Expect anywhere between one and three deaths," which is the norm every year.
With that bit of information at the back of their minds, the two decide to race with Harris taking the first shot. The task is to race up to 70 miles and hand the wheel over to Flintoff. This pattern repeats at the multiple checkpoints during the race. It is a bad start as the battery just dies out when they pull towards the start line hampering an early start. Even as they weave their way across town to reach the makeshift dirt path that serves as the track, the GPS conks out.
Minutes into the race, even as Flintoff travels to the checkpoint to switch places with Harris, the truck and Harris just encounter more issues as mechanical issues with the gearbox arise. This is followed by another obstacle with the power steering causing trouble that puts Harris at the back of the race. The realization that he's way far behind hits when we see footage of people calling it a day and packing up. With the roads getting busy, maneuvering the truck is an even dangerous task.
To put it bluntly, it’s not for the faint-hearted, the team captain informs Chris and Freddie that there is usually at least one death in each annual event, serious stuff indeed. When he finally makes it to the first checkpoint, the repairs estimate is four hours effectively putting an end to their race even as they vow to make it back the following year. Will Season 29 sees the duo finish the race? Only time will tell.
'Top Gear' Season 28 airs on Sundays at 8 pm ET on BBC America.
