Spin-offs
Top Gear was a title sponsor of the 1987 and 1988 Formula One "Winter Series", the 1990 and 1991 Historic Rally Championships and the 1992 and 1993 British Rally Championships.
Due to the success of the main show, other motoring shows on the BBC also carried the Top Gear name including coverage of the British Motor Show, a show dedicated to motorsport, presented by Tiff Needell, Top Gear Motorsport and the Lombard RAC Rally highlights show, presented by William Woollard, Sue Baker and Tony Mason, Top Gear Rally Report. In September 1993, a spin-off magazine, Top Gear Magazine, was launched, featuring articles and columns from the presenters and additional contributors. The magazine has become the UK's best selling car magazine (as of August 2006).
During the 1990s, Top Gear had a radio spin off, the Top Gear Radio Show, presented by Steve Berry, and available on BBC Radio Five Live.
In 1991, when joyriding among British youths was at its peak, Top Gear featured a Joy Riding special. It included an interview with Tyneside woman Joan McVittie, who was actively involved in campaigns against joyriding after her 16-year-old son Mark Wren was killed when the stolen car in which he was passenger crashed in October 1990. The driver was Ian Carr, 15 at the time, who was subsequently sentenced to a year in youth custody for causing death by reckless driving. Mrs McVittie continued her campaign against joyriding until her death from cancer in 2002. The killer driver, Ian Carr, was involved in a widely reported crime just months after Mrs McVittie died; on 31 December 2002, he was at the wheel of a stolen car which crashed into another car when jumping a red traffic light, fatally injuring a six-year-old girl and injuring her father and younger sister. By this stage, Carr (still only 27) had amassed a total of 89 convictions, many of them from motoring offences, was subject to two lifelong driving bans (issued in Scotland) and had only been released on licence from a prison sentence two months before the crash. He was subsequently jailed for nine-and-a-half years - one of the heaviest prison sentences ever imposed in England and Wales for causing death by dangerous driving.
Since the early 1990s, the annual Top Gear J. D. Power Top 100 survey has consulted thousands of UK residents on their car-ownership satisfaction. For legal reasons concerning the non-commercial nature of the BBC, the actual consultation is now restricted to the magazine format, although the results are still used on the show. The survey is now conducted by Experian.
The Top Gear video game, developed for the Super NES, was not associated with the BBC TV series and the BBC won a court case blocking its creators from obtaining a trademark for it.
After Top Gear's success in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a number of competing programmes were introduced, including Channel 4's driven, ITV's Pulling Power, Granada's Vroom Vroom and BBC World's India's Wheels. Some of the presenters on Driven would go on to present Top Gear.
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