Mastretta MXT: Orders UP thanks to Top Gear

Mastretta MXT - orders UP since Top Gear 'Insult'

Top Gear’s Mexican joke has seen visitors to Mastretta shoot up and orders for the Mastretta MXT increase

You might reasonably have thougt that Top Gear’s recent Mexican stand-off would have had the butt of its joke – the Mastretta MXT – suffering a severe downturn in sales. After all, according to Mexican Ambassador to London -Eduardo Medina-Mora Icaza – the Top Gear insults aimed at his country – and at Mastretta – were ‘Bigoted and Ignorant’.

Which, if the comments had been anything other than a feeble attempt at a joke on national stereotypes, may have been an appropriate response. But the Mexican comments on Top Gear came in the same category as ‘Cheese eating surrender monkeys’ (French),  ‘Rotten Teeth & Rotten Food’ (English), ‘Fat and Stupid’ (Americans) or ‘Too stoned to Care’ (Dutch).

All of which are based on very little (well, maybe the French…) and have just become trite phrases dragged out to jokingly insult a nation’s people. It’s just a shame the Mexicans and the Mexican Ambassador don’t have a sense of humour.

But it seems that being insulted by Top Gear does have a rather large silver lining. Mastretta has seen traffic to their website go through the roof since the Top Gear show ran. Not only that, but orders for the Mastretta MXT have shot up, with orders coming from across the globe.

With a history of making Minibuses, Mastretta is not an obvious place to seek out a swift-ish sports coupe. In fact, until the Top Gear furore, few Mexicans seemed to know that the Mastretta MXT existed, much less it had 250 horses from its Ford Duratec lump and could do 0-60mph in 4.5 seconds. Top Gear’s global audience of 350 million has remedied that.

Despite this, Mastretta boss Carlos Mastretta is still complaining that Top Gear’s comments were ‘xenophobic, discriminatory and racist’. Which of course they would have been had they been uttered to condemn a nation. That they were not seems to have been lost on Mexicans.

All of which goes to prove that the comments were nothing more than a poor joke. For if anyone has taken them seriously, no one would have gone off and bought a car from Mastratta – a car Top Gear said was “…lazy, feckless, flatulent, oaf with a moustache leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat.”

Perhaps Top Gear should ask for an apology from Señores Mastretta and Medina-Mora Icaza.

Or at least a commission.