Volkswagen Up! to feature on Top Gear this weekend!!!! Britain’s top motoring show takes the up! on a gruelling tour of Ukraine A Volkswagen up! is due to appear prominently in a 40-minute feature on Sunday night’s edition of Top Gear. The feature is one of the programme’s ‘road trips’, showing presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May demonstrating their love for compact, small-engined cars on a trip to Ukraine. With Clarkson in the Volkswagen up!, Hammond in a Ford Fiesta and May in a Dacia Sandero, the trio zoom around the Crimean Peninsula absorbing some local history, visiting an old Soviet submarine pen and enjoying their manoeuvrable, economical cars to the full. Unfortunately, their carefree time is curtailed when they are challenged to a vast drive, heading north across one of the largest countries in Europe, and they must take any steps necessary to fight the immense boredom of a long car journey. Eventually, the three arrive in Kiev only to receive one final and truly fearsome challenge: a drive into Chernobyl. It was essential to the success of the piece that the car completed the planned drives across Ukraine so the programme agreed to our car being fitted with running gear specially developed by Volkswagen for Russia, even though it was subsequently decided that the up! would not be sold there. The example in the programme is a standard model to German-market specification but fitted with Russian-specification springs and dampers riding 15 mm higher than the standard car. Following the Chernobyl leg, Volkswagen received a special certificate from the authorities in Ukraine confirming that that up! had been screened for radiation and was safe. Volkswagen would not have been represented if it was not for the tremendous support provided by our colleagues in the Communications Department in Wolfsburg, while the Volkswagen support team for the adventure consisted of two engineers from Wolfsburg and Mark Fowler from our Technical Service Centre at Wymbush. Although we don’t know the outcome of the piece, Jeremy has mentioned privately: “It was a bit slow but I absolutely fell in love with that car during the drive.” We hope this feature will be a fitting end to the brand’s Love up! campaign and provide it with an additional publicity boost.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Feb 2014 19:20:57 +0000
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