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"You did it in one minute…" The crowd falls quiet when he pauses, "fourty…" You could hear a pin, no, a piece of lint drop now, and Jeremy Clarkson lets it draw out as long as possible.
Tony Stark is never nervous. Not even a congressional hearing had been enough to make him sweat. But he's on the edge of his seat now, hands braced on his knees. And this is going out on national television. He gives it a half hour before it's all over YouTube and all of the Torrent sites.
"Five Point Four!" Clarkson crows. The crowd goes nuts and Tony yells out "YES!"
"You are officially the fastest Star in a Reasonably Priced Car we've ever had on the program," Clarkson says, scribbling it out on a strip of white magnet. TONY STARK 1.45.4.
He lets the magnet hover at the top of the leader board. "Y'know, I've just had a thought."
Tony shakes his head, "No, no, no. I have seen this show. I know you. The thoughts you have are not good."
"We do have a separate board for F1 drivers."
Tony gives him a wounded look, all big brown eyes and bottom lip. "That's incredibly unfair. Do I look like a professional race car driver to you?"
"Two words. Monaco Grand Prix."
"That's three words, and besides, I didn't even finish a whole lap!" Tony sinks back into the tatty armchair, arms folded in a huff.
Clarkson smirks, "Let's put it to the audience, shall we? Do you think Tony Stark counts as a F1 driver?"
Before the crowd can respond, Tony leans forward again. "Put me at the top of that lap board and I can make it worth your while."
Clarkson raises an eyebrow. "Better than Billie Piper in a see-through top?"
Tony just grins.
***
"The Mark IV armor is an astounding piece of engineering," Hammond narrates as the camera sweeps over red and gold paneling polished so perfectly that the clouds in the sky are reflected. "The boots contain Laser-guided particle beam emission units that allow the user to go from naught to one hundred in five point four seconds, with a top speed of one thousand and fifty four miles an hour. And it can reach altitudes of eighty five thousand feet."
The Top Gear cameras love engineering, and all cameras love Tony Stark, so it's no surprise that each frame and angle of the armor is gorgeously shot.
"It is the bleeding edge of what modern engineering can do," Hammond says as the scene changes to footage of Iron Man flying above a green and brown patchwork of countryside before he rockets out of frame. "Which is only as it should be considering that a single suit costs nearly three billion quid."
The scene shifts again, and now Hammond, Clarkson and May are standing in front of the junkyard of the damned. Among the sinners is the Salfa Romeaab limousine, the water damaged Toybota pickup boat, and in the background you can just make out a Suzuki Vitara absolutely bedazzled in blue lights. And these are only the recognizable ones.
A man in a white lab coat hands Hammond a letter and a box. Hammond opens the box to find three discs, each glowing a brilliant blue white. May takes the letter and reads, "Stark Industries has kindly provided the power source used by the Iron Man Armor. In return we are providing a budget of fifteen hundred pounds each, and the remains of previous challenges for you to create your own powered armor." He folds the letter back up and looks a bit lost.
Hammond wrinkles his nose, "But that's like, a millionth of what the suit costs."
"In other words," May says, "We're supposed to build our own Iron Man suit, with no budget at all, from a box of scraps."
Clarkson picks up one of the miniature arc reactors. "Well how hard could it be?"