For decades the swamp buggy races in Naples, Florida have been bringing motorsports fans and gearheads together for fun and excitement on the Mile-o-Mud. Like many of you, we were turned onto the sport through television in the 1980s and while it maintains its status as a fringe form of racing, it is still thriving and the equipment continues to get faster and better each year. Through complete happenstance, we found this old clip of Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson getting strapped into a swamp buggy and running it flat out around the course.
The commentary is funny and since he wasn’t doing anything overtly offensive and/or inflammatory toward the people he was hanging out with, everyone got along fine. We all remember what happened a couple of years ago when the guys decided to drive through the South while mocking the area and then fleeing for their lives. It is fun to see his reaction and to listen to him scream and yell his way around the course while at the helm of the 500hp machine.
It had to have been fun for him because while driving all different kinds of cars on tracks and bendy roads is cool, nothing is cooler than getting into a full race vehicle of which you have never seen in person or driven the likes of and then hammering the gas. The in-car video is cool as well as the shots taken from outside of the buggy. It looks like this was a 2WD machine and if our memory serves correctly on these things, the 2WD buggies tend to be faster than the 4WD buggies. David Sims was a name from the past we remember in his Shagnasty 4WD buggy and of course the Chesser family was a dominating force as well. Part of us wishes that they had plugged Clarkson into one of the trundling Jeeps that wade their way over the course but alas, he was in this hammer of a buggy.
