I read Rutledge Wood’s post on Facebook yesterday as my wife and I were out shopping for electrical equipment for our garage, and immediately my stomach turned sour. As Brian told you guys yesterday, according to Rut, Top Gear USA is done…at least on the History Channel. The hint there is that there is a possibility that it could return to another channel, like Velocity, but whether that will happen or not is an unknown. All we know is that as far as the McTaggart household is concerned, the story of Top Gear USA is one taken directly out of General Motors’ playbook: once the kinks are worked out and the majority of people start to really like what’s going on, it gets killed off.

To be fair, Top Gear USA has always faced an uphill battle, as many of the other spinoff series have. There wasn’t much going for it when it was announced back in 2008, NBC bailed on production after test results for their pilot bombed, and when the show finally debuted on the History Channel in 2010, the online comments flowed like a river of pure venom, bashing Rutledge, Tanner Faust and Adam Ferrara as poor replacements for Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond. How the show managed to stay on the air as long as it has with Internet comments being used as a measuring stick for progress is beyond me, but as far as the show itself, I’ll say what needs to be said: it was good. It wasn’t Top Gear UK, and mercifully, after the second season they U.S. crew ditched the carbon-copy approach altogether and stepped into their own, but it was good and honest just the same. Their trip to Alaska in four-wheel-drive trucks had the properly epic feel, and Adam’s Caddy jump during a “moonshiner’s run” episode was probably the biggest single thing that brought in viewers in the early days. There’s plenty of loathing still for Top Gear USA from Clarkson-era Top Gear fanboys, but if you ever needed proof that the Top Gear USA guys were doing as much as possible to try to do it right, all you needed to do was to measure the amount of air under Ferrara’s Cadillac when he jumped it, or to measure Faust’s tire marks, or to listen to Rutledge’s laughter as the show went on. You can’t fake enthusiasm for cars, and these three had it.

I can’t speak for Tanner, because I’ve never met the guy, but I can speak for Rutledge and Adam. I met Rut earlier this year at One Lap when they came to the National Corvette Museum Motorsports Park. When he wasn’t driving one of the two Toyota Sienna minivans that was participating, he was talking with anyone and everyone who approached him, and not in a manner you’d expect from a celebrity. It wasn’t just a “hi, how are ya, good to meet ya, NEXT” kind of deal. Rutledge would chat as long as he was able to…maybe it was a couple of minutes because it was a group thing, maybe it’d be a bit longer if he was free, but you never felt like you were rushed away because he was a big star with important things to do. Ferrara has made it a point to interact with his fans via social media, especially Facebook, and during this last season, has been live online, posting several times during an episode and chatting with fans. I told him that it was extremely cool to see him making people’s day by responding to as many messages as he could on Facebook, and I meant that. Adam seemed to delight in reading what his audience sent him and would answer just about anything, from questions on the episode to his time on his other shows, like Nurse Jackie and Rescue Me.

So now TG USA is gone. We get tonight’s episode in Cuba, and that’s it…and that sucks. With the overload of car-themed shows, it’s sad that one that was doing it’s best, with three guys who genuinely wanted to both enjoy cars and entertain people, had to be the one to get the ax. I guess there weren’t enough tattoos, or studded jeans, or obnoxious catch phrases. Maybe they didn’t blow up enough cars, or there just wasn’t enough controversy in the headlines. But from the first season to the last, the crew of Top Gear USA gave it their best shot and there’s at least one household that hopes that another season emerges somewhere. Thanks for your hard work, guys.

Photo: Facebook/Adam Ferrara