The Apprentice: How did Bognor's Phil Turner do this week? Can he escape the bottom three?

The baker was far out of his culinary comfort zone on this week’s challenge, which saw Sugar’s two teams setting out to design and brand a racing car form Formula E events – which uses electronic vehicles, rather than petrol-powered machines.

A string of losses for the boys meant the battle of the sexes format deployed by earlier episodes is no longer viable, and this week’s show like last week’s, saw the 13 remaining contestants split up into two mixed teams.

Phil found himself on Team Supreme (awful name, in this hack’s humble opinion), headed up by dentist Paul Midha, who carved out a place for himself as project manager by citing his passion for motorsport. Facing off against them was a team headed up by record label owner Tre Lowe.

Both teams looked to capitalise on the environmentally friendly benefits of Formula E events; Paul’s team focused on the air, where Tre’s focused on the impact of pollution on the sea.

Phil looked a bit lost during initial negotiations with a corporate sponsor keen to secure pride of place on the car, and his repeated interjections seemed to bungle pricing discussions that were already well handled by teammates Flo and Paul. Meanwhile Virdi, who had agreed to tackle the branding side of things, bungled the brand logo, somehow misspelling the word “exhilaration” (which was miserably out of place to begin with), and putting out a tortured promotional video which looked and felt like it was recorded by a sixth former in their dad’s loft.

Guided by Virdi’s questionable logo, Paul opted for an even dodgier orange-green colour scheme on the car itself. That looked weird enough, but Phil’s idea for a tree on the front of the car – into which prospective sponsors could put their logo – was even weirder; no corporate sponsor is going to want to make their logo smaller in order to fit in a tree!

Despite all that, it was Paul’s sales acumen that saved the day with Team Supreme’s main corporate sponsors. They dropped the front of the car – the part with the tree on it – but paid some £15 million for two alternative spaces. They were even impressed by Paul’s colour scheme, which Paul claimed was inspired by the sponsor’s country of origin; India.

However unlikely it seemed, things were going well for Paul and co. That is until the pitch meeting, where Team Supreme presented their car to corporate sponsors in a bid to get a few more logos on their car. Virdi’s embarrassing excuse for a video didn’t impress the execs, and team member Onyeka’s sales pitch made almost no sense. Between an unclear message and their garish colour scheme, the team had a very hard time indeed finding more sponsors.

Despite a similarly terrible logo, Tre’s pitch went down a treat with a room full of execs who were swayed by the producer’s impassioned speech about the climate and their car’s slick, sophisticated colour scheme. So, when it came down to brass tax, Paul, Phil and co were on the wrong end of the table, making just £21 million compared to Tre’s £38.7 million.

Despite contributing miserably little to this week’s proceedings, Phil avoided the bottom three – but only just. Instead it was Onyeka at the business end of Lord Sugar’s stumpy finger for her total failure to pitch the brand.

Personally, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Phil went out this week, and it pains me to suggest he might even have deserved it. With five straight losses on his track sheet so far, he contributed almost nothing to this week’s project, and what little he did suggest proved disastrous.

Phil is obviously a capable businessman, with an air of honesty, integrity and a broad, everyman appeal; he’s refreshingly straightforward in a board room full of show-offs and pretenders, but he needs to step up his game to be in with a chance of winning that £250,000 contract.

Watch The Apprentice on BBC One or BBC iPlayer every Thursday at 9pm.