The test that followed called for each presenter to drive up a 1-in-3 (33.3% grade) hill, stop at a specified stopping point, put on the handbrake and get out, with £100 awarded if the car remained stationary. James missed a turn and got lost on the track, with the other two not even bothering to read out his time afterwards. Jeremy came closest at only a second behind in the Rover, while Richard ended up five seconds slower.
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The power test consisted of timed laps on the handling circuit, with the mark to beat set by the Stig in a Datsun 120Y - as James said, "the little Japanese car that showed our dads that they didn't need to have a flaky Austin 1100 that broke down all the time." The benchmark was 1:11, and despite having more powerful cars, none of the presenters was able to beat it. Eventually, the three arrived at a suitable testing venue - the MIRA test track in Nuneaton on the A5, described by James as an "automotive torture chamber." The journey to the old factory sites and to MIRA served as a reliability test, but no presenter earned money because none of them had managed to complete the journey without pulling over and opening the bonnet. None of the locations they went to worked - the old Morris factory in Oxford had been taken over by BMW, the old Triumph factory in Canley had been turned into a hotel and the old Austin factory in Longbridge had been bought by the Chinese and then razed. They suffered a few problems along the way, with one of them (shown by Richard via camera) being Jeremy accidentally getting his finger stuck in a hole for an aerial in his front wing. Instead of telling the presenters what the first challenge was, the producers told them to travel 40 miles to get it. They talked about the Dolomite's arm rest being made of floorboards (since it was made of real wood that had not been sanded) when James turned up in a 1979 Austin Princess - which was derided by the other two as a poor choice.
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Jeremy was the first to arrive in a 1982 Rover SD1, while Richard bought a 1974 Triumph Dolomite Sprint using an extra £50.