Poignant, powerful and – dare we say – moving, the last five minutes of last night’s Top Gear has got everyone talking.

Jeremy Clarkson was driving the new Aston Martin V12 in amazing surroundings with a beautiful soundtrack amazingly shot.

However, he wasn’t screaming power or hammering the Aston through every corner – he was talking solemnly about how cars like the ‘fantastic, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful Aston’ could be a thing of the past.

It was a standout section of what was a disappointing series overall. It was so well shot I watched the clip again on iPlayer.

And the music for the feature is best known for its role in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and is known as ‘The End’ by Brian Eno.

With the launches of the new Ferrari 458 Italia, Mercedes SLS and new McLaren, the future of the supercar is secured for the time being but is Top Gear’s?

With the recession slashing the BBC’s budget and a constant crusade against motoring, Top Gear is becoming even more politically incorrect. It’s easy to make Clarkson and co scapegoats with the motormouth rumoured to be one of the Beeb’s top earners. Cutbacks earlier this year saw the team scrap plans to go out to Italy to recreate the final scenes from The Italian Job due to cost being massively prohibitive.

And unfortunately this series didn’t live up to its high expectations.

There was nothing epic, nothing biblical, no challenges to challenge the likes of the trip across Botswana, or to the North Pole. We’ve become accustomed to the guys doing something never achieved before with Jezza rounding the episode off with a profound statement be it about their Vietnam bike trek or USA road trip. 

Instead they recycled the £1,500 coupe feature which had been used a couple of years back and went on a Majorcan rally. Despite my personal disappointment with the series, viewing figures were still high with 6.5 million tuning in to last night’s episode.

There were a few brilliant parts from the series – as a guest Jay Leno was superb, a genuine superstar, a genuine petrolhead.

The video of Ken Block jumping a Subaru Impreza over a ramp with a bomber flying past at the same time was breathtaking and we got to see the McLaren F1 race the Bugatti Veyron. Even Michael Schumacher showed up as The Stig, all be it as a huge PR stunt for Fiat, Bacardi and Ferrari.

Clarkson said last night Top Gear will be back testing cars in November and we recently reported the team are now filming an Italian Job remake – but in Belfast.

Will it return? Will Richard ‘Rapunzel’ Hammond’s hair grow long enough for him to be saved from the top of that cherry picker? So many questions to answer but we’ll be straight onto it if we hear anything.

The BBC were unavailable for comment.

What did you think of last night’s episode? Is this the end of Top Gear? Have your say on the Auto Trader Blog