Top Gear Alpine A110 Fire Started With An “Electrical Failure, Danger” Warning

After the episode aired on April 1st, 2018, Chirs Harris took to topgear.com to give us the first-person narrative of what happened on that unfortunate day at the Monte Carlo Rally. Without further beating around the bush, Harris was in the car with Eddie Jordan. And then, the instrument cluster lit up: “Electrical failure, danger.”

You’ve heard the man. Instead of saying check engine or showing the wrench symbol, the A110 happens to know when it has an electrical problem. However, the pièce de résistance is how the instrument cluster told the driver “danger,” as if it knew that spontaneous combustion is possible.

The warning came after “a few minutes” of “little slides coming out of the hairpins,” which were done in second and first gear. What happened next? “So I looked up at the next bend, looked down again and the whole dashboard had gone… and the engine cut completely.”

After seeing smoke coming out of the Alpine, he and Eddie abandoned ship, then watched how the A110 burned down to the ground. “We now know there was a fuel leak under the car, probably between Eddie’s left buttock and my right buttock.” Chris highlights that a load of fuel had been dumped on the ground, though it’s hard to understand what could have generated the leak in the first place.

Being a pre-production prototype, the A110 doesn’t need to meet the quality control requirements of the production vehicle. “It was a development car and these things happen; I was just glad that we got out fine,” he told the British publication.

When Top Gear aired the episode with the Alpine A110 on BBC, Renault’s PR department urged Chris Harris to read out loud an official statement on the incident. And that is, “robust measures are being put in place to ensure that such an incident cannot reoccur.”