16/11/2011 14:20 | By Steve Walker, content editor, MSN Cars

New series of Top Gear

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Top Gear series 17 is go (© TopGear.com)

TopGear.com

That's it then, yet another series of the BBC's defiantly popular Top Gear car show is off and motoring after the first episode aired tonight.

The initial instalment of the show's latest Sunday night sequence answered some burning questions along the way as well - all of them emphatically in the negative.

Most of us already knew better than to wonder if Top Gear might depart from the formula that's served it so well, if the presenting team would abandon the irreverence and sarcasm in the face of recent controversies or if there might be a new focus on the boring cars that most of us drive. Now we know for certain. That ain't gonna happen.

Sunday night escapism
Top Gear's special blend of escapism by tyre smoke, horsepower and breaking things continues unabated. The new series, the 17th since Clarkson and co reinvented the show's flagging automotive magazine format in 2002, will be business as usual to the extent that episode one could genuinely have been plucked from the midst of any of the previous 16 runs. Only the slightly more lived-in look the presenters are sporting these days might give the game away.

That familiarity is fine, of course, because armies of fans love Top Gear and millions more will choose to watch if the show's placed in a Sunday night toss-up against Countryfile and Popstar to Operastar.

Channel 5's cunning scheduling of the classic second world war romp Where Eagles Dare may have had some of the target audience wavering, but they could still tune-in after Top Gear to catch Richard Burton flexing his acting muscles and Clint Eastwood giving the Germans what for.

E-Type
There was enough patriotic flag waving to satisfy most viewers in this episode of Top Gear anyway. We saw Jeremy saluting the beautiful Jaguar E-Type in its 50th anniversary year with a little help from the armed forces. We were treated to marching bands, commandos unfurling banners down the side of Beachy Head, balloons and overflies from a Spitfire and a Hurricane.

The show remains a Royal Tournament, every Sunday evening. Its ability to conjure up whatever it likes at vast expense, organisation and favour-begging, for just 40 or so seconds of screentime, remains astonishing.

James May with Minis (© BBC)

BBC

James May met Britain's Winter Olympic gold medallist Amy Williams - then put her skeleton bob up against Kris Meeke in the MINI works rally car. The MINI won.

Even the Germans got a far easier ride than Clint was busy dishing out on the other side. The impressive BMW 1 Series M Coupé received a resounding thumbs-up after being put through its power-sliding paces and belted around the track by The Stig.

BMW 1 Series M Coupe

Golf-loving rocker Alice Cooper was as eccentric as ever in the role of star guest, before getting into the reasonably priced car for a sluggish lap in sodden conditions.

Hammond, meanwhile, had opened proceedings by climbing aboard the massive, massively ugly and monumentally politically incorrect Marauder SUV. Any car that can make the Hummer H3 look like a Kia Picanto deserves respect.

Lots to look forward to
All things considered, it was an appropriately action-packed show to launch the new series with Clarkson, Hammond and May continuing to do what they do and few signs of the Top Gear juggernaut hitting the crash barriers just yet.

What's next? Well, still to come this series we've got a hot hatch shoot-out on the streets of Monte Carlo, the Ferrari 458 Italia versus the McLaren MP4-12C, Richard Hammond driving a tank and someone getting Jeremy Clarkson's name tattooed on what we'll describe here as their lower back. It could only be Top Gear.