It Looks Like The Top Gear Test Track Is Going To Be Destroyed

With Top Gear having fallen from grace for many, the local council that oversees Dunsfold Aerodrome has given the green light to a scheme that will wipe its primary filming location from the face of the earth

Matt Kimberley

19 Dec 2016

It Looks Like The Top Gear Test Track Is Going To Be Destroyed

As if the campaign denouncing new new Top Gear needed any more to moan about, it looks like the world-famous airfield that served as the Top Gear Test Track is about to be scrubbed off the face of the earth.

With the show in a certain amount of turmoil after Chris Evans’ failed experiment at the helm for the last series, Waverley Borough Council has voted to allow developers to bulldoze Dunsfold Aerodrome to make way for 1800 new houses and flats, plus an expanded business park.

Waverley Borough Council first took the application in December 2015, suggesting that developers saw an opportunity to make some money after Jeremy Clarkson punched a Top Gear producer and was ultimately forced out of the BBC, taking Ricard Hammond and James May with him.

Included in that is a small retail area with a pub or restaurant, perfect for drowning your sorrows over the TV history the car world will have lost.

There are reportedly over 100 businesses already on site. The application involves demolishing over 8000 square metres of existing properties, retaining another 36,700 and building around 51,000 more.

Plans include a primary school, research and development businesses, storage warehouses, a care home and large ponds with some kind of recreational facilities. The three runways would be removed completely.

There’s little more information than that available at present, but it looks like a fairly big nail in the coffin of one of the car world’s prized ‘possessions’.

Earlier this year the company that ran the Top Gear Track Experience collapsed due to free-falling customer numbers.

Comments

Let it burn to the ground and long live The Grand Tour!

I did an upvote of sympathy, not of approval.

Looks like they couldn’t “Follow-through”…

insert pun dog

That is a sad day. I didn´t believe when one of my friends told me that they are building a house estate in there.
15 years of such great memories.
Seriously 2016 is a year to forget… :(
This music IMO is a way to homage the track.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t8HbAXVKII&list=PLD8E6EC4CBA64562D&index=84

Anyone sensing the Eboladrome coming to the next Forza???

It’d be awesome!

Oh, the comments are thriving with people single-handedly blaming the BBC for this. I suppose they’re the very people who wouldn’t even give the new Top Gear a chance simply because it didn’t have Clarkson. You don’t watch the show, the show has little income, show can’t pay track bills. I’m not saying that Chris Harris’ TG is excellent - Especially with the ginger Chris - But I’m pretty sure thousands before me has pointed out how great the “original” Top Gear was in season 1. Or how great, groundbreaking, and unrepetitive JC’s Top Gear was in its last 3 season.

The BBC messed up. But so did Jeremy. He himself knew that. In any perspective, you can’t really hit a co-worker and expect to still be employed. That’s completely unprofessional and childish, and you can’t justify that simply because he’s Clarkson.