Meet the presenters

Move over Clarkson, Hammond and May, because Fifth Gear has three motoring muskateers of its own. All veterans of the original Top Gear, they're Quentin Willson, Tiff Needell and Vicki Butler-Henderson.

Quentin discovered his knack for cars back in uni, when he had a nice sideline in doing up second-hand motors and flogging them for obscene amounts of beer money (in his final year he sold a Jag for £750 profit). He then became a motoring journalist before being recruited for telly. Tiff Needell, meanwhile, is a former racing driver who once came third place in the legendary Le Mans race. (In other words, he has the gob of a Clarkson and the skills of a Stig). And as for the refreshingly non-male Vicki Butler-Henderson... well, she started karting as a youngster and was such a consummate petrolhead that she was a racing instructor at Silverstone at the unfeasible age of 17. Oh, and she's an experienced power boater as well.

A smashing time

For much of its run, Fifth Gear has been relatively accident-free. Then, in 2007, as if spurred into action by Richard Hammond's recent brush with death, the Fifth Gear team proved they could smash themselves up almost as well as anyone on the rival show.

First up was presenter Tom Ford, who managed to break his foot while swerving around in an A-Team style van. Actually the swerving was intentional as it was a segment on "drifting" (i.e. driving sideways), but he got a bit carried away and ploughed into a crash barrier while performing a victory drift. An even more painful incident happened later in that series, when a Caparo T1 supercar simply burst into flames when driver Jason Plato was behind the wheel. Luckily he wasn't too badly injured, so Top Gear's Hamster still rules the roost when it comes to giant terrifying cock-ups on camera.

The shoot outs

Newcomers to Fifth Gear will want to look out for the most famous segment – the regular "shoot outs" between cars that are similarly priced, similarly fast, and generally so similar that the only way to see which one is better is to punish them both at the Anglesey Circuit in North Wales.

The shoot-outs often impart useful knowledge - like the time they raced two Audi TTs to see whether the manual or the semi-automatic fared better. But sometimes the team are just out to have a lark, like when they indulged their retro-fantasies by pitting the Ford Gran Torino from Starsky and Hutch against the Dodge Charger from Dukes of Hazzard. And then there was the time Tiff drove a couple of cars with one of his arms strapped to his body. The great big show off.

Gear vs Gear

So, now that we're rudely putting Fifth Gear onto the same channel as Top Gear, it's time to ask the question: which one is better? The answer, of course, is neither. And no, that's not a stinking fat cop out on our part.

The metaphorically-minded can think of the shows as siblings. Top Gear is the cheeky scamp endlessly setting fire to things and disobeying the old folks, while Fifth Gear is the sensible one who studies hard and gets things done. And so they complement each other rather well, with Fifth Gear placing greater emphasis on car news and reviews while Top Gear concentrates on playing "car darts" and the like. Plus, Tiff and Vicki are former racers, which some might say makes their opinions that little bit more credible. (That sound you hear is Clarkson scoffing.)