Top Gear Segments - The Cool Wall

The Cool Wall

Introduced in the sixth episode of series one, Clarkson and Hammond decide which cars are cool and which are not by placing photographs of them on to various sections of a large board. The categories are "Sub Zero", "Cool", "Uncool", and "Seriously Uncool". Initially, part of the coolness factor rested on the extent to which the presenters believed each car would impress English actress Kristin Scott Thomas, although more recently, BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce has replaced Scott Thomas as their notional judge. When Scott Thomas appeared on the show in series nine, she turned out to dislike all the 'cool' cars and like all the 'uncool' cars. They have also added a separate 'DB9 Section', a mini fridge on a table to the right of the board, for those cars considered "super cool". It initially contained just the DB9, with the V8 Vantage, nicknamed the "Baby Aston", joining it in the seventh series. On one occasion, a particularly uncool car's picture was stuck onto a member of the audience to the left of the board.

An acknowledged rule of the Cool Wall is that cars owned by the presenters cannot be considered cool. In series nine, Clarkson was forced to place the Gallardo Spyder in the Uncool section because he had just bought one. He then revealed that he had sold his Ford GT, allowing him to move the car into the Sub-Zero section.

Frequently Clarkson and Hammond will disagree over which section a car should be placed in, with Clarkson nearly always winning the argument — sometimes by placing the car at the very top of the wall in his favoured section, preventing the much shorter Hammond from being able to reach it. On one occasion, Hammond began eating the card on which a BMW M6 was featured, preventing it from being used. In series six, Clarkson slipped two spinal disks from "repetitive oversteer injury" and was unable to bend down. Taking advantage of this, Hammond ended an argument by placing the car in question at the bottom of the board.

In the fourth episode of series nine, Hammond attempted to place a Ducati 1098 motorcycle on the wall, but due to his hatred of motorcycles Clarkson removed it (and some of the wall) with a chainsaw. Clarkson pointed the chainsaw at Hammond and jokingly said, "Run or you'll be a lot shorter".

In the first episode of series ten, the fire-damaged Cool Wall was featured in the programme. It, along with other studio furniture (including the chairs used during the News segment) had been damaged or destroyed in a fire at the warehouse where props were stored.

However, in the second episode of series eleven, a new Cool Wall was started, with all the previous cars on the board still in the same place.

In the 13th season Hammond tried to stop Jeremy from removing the 370z from sub-zero by bringing in a cherry-picker and put it out of reach even for Jeremy, but when Hammond was up there Jeremy killed the power and then continued to stick pictures of the Pagani Zonda and Hammond in the "seriously uncool" section and left him up there for the rest of the episode.