The Top Gear Story (15 page)

‘What James May achieved was tremendous. If you think about it, the human brain evolved over millions of years to deal with a top speed of about 30kmph if you’re lucky on a horse, or less if you are running. If you tune something for the normal environment it operates in, it works very well. Even up to about 50kmph, we are pretty aware of everything around us; however, as you get faster and faster, you start to attend to less and less.

‘Imagine a TV screen playing back some footage, a single frame at a time. At slow speed you can tell each individual frame apart and as you speed the frames up, all that happens is they begin to flicker faster and faster. But you still see them as separate frames. Then all of a sudden your brain is overwhelmed and can’t keep up, and then suddenly everything merges into a smooth movie. That’s a television picture. This is an analogy with what’s happening [to May in the Veyron] – at some point, the brain simply can’t cope with everything so instead of trying to resolve all the detail, your brain starts to take shortcuts. Like the TV frame suddenly switching to a movie, it’s a non-linear process. So, 300km/h isn’t just three times 100 km/h; there’s a real transition where it suddenly gets hard. Professional racing drivers have of course had years of practice to train the brain [in] how to cope with this but an amateur like James can quickly get overwhelmed. So when he was doing this extraordinary speed, he was getting bombarded with visual richness and the complexities of the task, trying to control the car and suddenly it can become overwhelming – it was remarkable.’

And what other TV show would race a fighter jet against a car? For a brilliant Series 10 Veyron feature,
Top Gear
didn’t pick any old
fighter jet either, but instead the revolutionary Eurofighter Typhoon, one of the most technologically advanced aircraft ever built. They had included fighter jets before, such as when they used the Harrier Jump Jet to analogise the new TVR 350c (the point being both were excellent updates of previous models), but this Typhoon piece was altogether different. The race – at RAF Coningsby airfield – was understandably one of
Top Gear
’s most complex shoots, with a reported 60-plus personnel on site for the day. Once again, the Veyron was getting the star treatment from
Top Gear
.

Another heart-pounding moment for Bugatti and
Top Gear
fans came in Series 12, when May drove the Veyron against Hammond’s all-time favourite supercar, the stunning Pagani Zonda F. But the best head-to-head of all came in the following series, when the crew flew to Abu Dhabi to perform a straight drag race between the Veyron and the legendary McLaren F1. The sight of the Veyron streaming up a one-mile Abu Dhabi road alongside the McLaren is possibly one of – if not
the
– favourite clip in the entire history of
Top Gear
. It wasn’t a fair fight, of course: remember, the Veyron is far more powerful in terms of bhp than even a F1 car (its top speed of 400kph is beyond the usual F1 top rate of 360kph).

On the day of the drag race, Hammond raced the Veyron while The Stig took the wheel of the F1. The McLaren F1 actually beat the Veyron off the line and held its own to around the 125mph mark, but then the colossal Veyron engine kicked in and left its rival for dust. Hammond said the slower start was due to leaving the Veyron’s launch control switched off, which he only did to make it ‘more interesting’.

One final mind-blowing statistic: if you set up a drag race in a McLaren F1 and a Veyron, you can let the F1 get to 120mph before the Veyron even starts and it will still reach 200mph first; in fact, if the Veyron starts at exactly the same time as the F1, it will get
to 200mph and then nearly back to a standstill before the McLaren has yet to hit 200.

But the purpose of the Abu Dhabi drag race wasn’t just to burn up prodigious amounts of fuel and tyre rubber: the show cleverly highlighted the contrasting design ethos in each car. The F1 has long been heralded as the ultimate purist’s car, a stripped-back, no-frills racing experience on the road; the Veyron by contrast, has comfortable leather seats, a CD player, air-conditioning, all the mod-cons. The fact that The Stig was given the F1 is itself an indication of its racing purity (and therefore the skill needed to drive it), compared to the ‘everyday use-ability’ of the Veyron.

For this viewer at least, it wasn’t about the actual race or the rights and wrongs of the designers’ respective approaches, as much the sight of the two automotive legends on the same strip of tarmac. Just the thought of the two greatest cars ever built on the same piece of road was exhilarating. Having been lucky enough to travel in an F1 but not a Veyron, I have a soft spot for the former and was slightly saddened to find it so brutally despatched, but it almost wasn’t about the winner: this was just such a beautifully filmed and subtle piece of TV.

In Series 15,
Top Gear
went to the very limits of the Veyron’s capabilities once more when they tested the souped-up Super Sport version to see if its claimed top speed of 258mph (257.91, to be precise) was accurate. So, which red-blooded,
death-defying
, psychotic daredevil would Bugatti allow to take this beast on the road and film the speed record attempt? Why, Captain Slow again, of course. According to reports, the only reason why he was made to test this brutal hypercar was because Clarkson had hurt his neck driving a lorry through a brick wall and Hammond claimed to be unavailable as he was ‘selling fish at Morrisons’ (namely filming adverts for that supermarket, for which he is ridiculed mercilessly by his
colleagues). May certainly lucked out with the testing of such a car and eventually reached a top speed of 259.11mph. After he climbed out, the Bugatti test driver got in and promptly took the Super Sport to 267.86 mph across the required two runs, confirming its status as the world’s fastest production car (faster even than Bugatti had suspected).

At the time of writing, the Super Sport stands proud at the top of the
Top Gear
lap times with a stunning record of 1.16.8 minutes (nearly a full two seconds faster than its ‘slow’ sister car, the standard Veyron). Even the Gumpert Apollo, basically a racing car just about made road legal and safe, can’t live with that – but for how long?

The Bugatti’s apparent invincibility is regarded as so complete that it seemed to many no coincidence that in early 2010, Ferrari’s chief executive Amedeo Felisa declared his company were no longer interested in such extravagant speeds: ‘Top speed is not important to us anymore.’

Yet the Bugatti will not have it all its own way. Initially all contenders trembled, but then along came the American-built Shelby SSC Ultimate Aero. Made by a company whose founder invented a revolutionary scanning system for breast cancer, the Shelby can reach 256mph. Then the Bugatti hit back with the ludicrously bullet-like Super Sport and in October 2010, the new SSC was unveiled, boasting 1350bhp in a car only a third as heavy as a Veyron. It can wheel-spin in fourth gear above 100mph. Apparently.

So, where will all this speed freaking lead us? At the time of writing, several manufacturers are developing and building cars that may well top the Veyron Super Sport. One such model, the Transtar Dagger GT, comes with an estimated top speed of 314mph. If it ever materialises, there can be only one TV show to review it …

T
here’s a
Top Gear
sketch where Richard Hammond is seen casually walking around his ‘estate’ – the grounds of his £2 million mock castle in Herefordshire – talking about how driving fast cars for a living, mucking about with his mates and having a beautiful wife and kids is a dream life. He knows this very well, nothing is taken for granted. Speaking to the
Guardian
, he once said: ‘My work spaces are the studio, the Cool Wall, the bunker and the track outside. Oh, and anything with a steering wheel. I have sat in a car driving in the hills of St Tropez and I’ve thought, “Another day in the office.”’ Generally, and contradictory to the oft-quoted British attitude to success, Hammond finds most
Top Gear
fans are supportive of him doing so well: ‘If people are jealous of me, they are very generous. They come up and smile and say, “You’ve got the best job in the world.”’

Hammond’s wife Amanda is known to her friends as Mindy and the Hammond clan live near Weston under Penyard, Ross-on-Wye
(they also own a plush apartment in central London). Mindy loves cars too, something which Hammond says is very fortunate for him! He appears to be a fond advocate of the country life and frequently involves himself in the local community: according to some reports, when he was announced as president of the 31st Herefordshire Country Fair – normally a sleepy, modestly rural event – over 15,000 people turned up on the day hoping to catch a glimpse of the star. So, Hammond is a petrol-head incarnate but he’s also a country bumpkin, having a coterie of creatures that includes three horses, three dogs (a Bull Mastiff crossed with a Great Dane, a Border Collie and a Poodle called Pablo), two cats, a rabbit, ducks, chickens, goats and sheep. ‘I think it is immensely beneficial to be around animals,’ he told
www.timesonline.co.uk
, ‘physically, mentally and spiritually. I watch the way that my
two-year
-old interacts with the dog and it is a wonderful thing.’ However, he is not a fan of all animals – as revealed in the
Top
Gear
‘Bolivia’ special, he apparently has a phobia of insects.

When he does venture to the city, Hammond is known to cycle around London on a hybrid bike (Clarkson is famously not a fan, dubbing them among other things ‘ethnic peace bicycles’). Of course, Richard is often spotted by passers-by, who invariably heckle him in good humour: ‘When people see me out on it, they always call out, “Where’s your Ferrari?” Of course I haven’t got one, I work for the BBC.’

But his private garage has graduated somewhat from his first car – a 1976 Toyota Corolla Liftback, a slightly odd-looking, very early hatchback on which he painted a Shelby racing stripe before ultimately writing it off in a crash with a Volvo. Quite in contrast to his small frame – which has seen him christened ‘The Hamster’ – Hammond is a big fan of American muscle cars and over the years, has presented passionate and informative
Top Gear
pieces on that genre of car. In his own garage, he has had a
Dodge Charger, a Ford Mustang and a Dodge Challenger, as well as the quintessentially British Morgan Aeromax and the classic vintage icon, the Jaguar E-Type, as well as a Land Rover Defender. He loves monster trucks and is also an avid motorbike fan, for which Clarkson and May constantly lambast him; he has owned many Porsches over the years, that being his favourite marque.

As a quick aside, one of Hammond’s most fun pieces (and one where you can tangibly see in his delighted schoolboy-ish eyes that he can’t quite believe what a fantastic job he has), came in Series 4, when the team invited the aforementioned nun onto the show to drive a monster truck. This bizarre spectacle followed on from some grannies doing doughnuts in Series 1, but that clearly wasn’t dangerous enough. Enter stage left Sister Wendy, who we are told prays five times a day and devotes her entire life to God; she was confronted by the monster truck Blown Thunder, complete with its behemoth dragster engine and 1700bhp, which was capable of jetting the near-five ton vehicle to 60mph in four seconds. Sister Wendy proved quite adept and commendably vaulted the old bangers, whispering an endearing ‘Oh, my sweet Lord!’ as she did so.

Back at Castle Hammond, Richard also loves to keep fit. In July 2007, when much of Britain was underwater due to the country’s most severe flooding in living memory, he was on a late-night charge back to his Herefordshire mansion to be home for his daughter’s birthday the next day. However, the weather was so calamitous that he gave up driving his 911 after more than 13 hours stuck in stranded traffic, even though he was still some 16 miles from home. So, at 3am he parked up his Porker and ran all the way back, arriving exhausted but in time for his little girl’s birthday at 5.30am. He has run marathons and even needs occasional osteopathy to ease aching joints as he runs so much. A fit hamster indeed!

He admits he likes to look after himself. One of many running gags on
Top Gear
(apart from the relentless barrage about his height) centres round Hammond’s alleged use of teeth-whitening kits. For example, after he’d tested a Marcos in Series 7, the footage returned to the studio only for Clarkson to pull such a kit out of the rear seat; likewise, in a 2009 episode the presenters phoned around for car insurance, giving their ages as seventeen, and a teeth whitening kit was seen on Hammond’s desk (later, in a one-off interview with Sir Stirling Moss, he is filmed having false eyelashes applied).

Perhaps the most laughable but endearing jokes at his expense came while testing the Bowler Wildcat in Series 2. This machine was (very) loosely based around the Land Rover, but that’s like saying a superbike is ‘loosely’ related to a pushbike: the £50,000 beast was capable of a 0–60 time of 4.8 seconds (that’s a tenth quicker than an Aston Martin DB7), it boasted a whopping five-litre V8 engine and could drive at high speed across mountain ranges normally populated only by goats and glaciers. Hammond had an absolute blast and later said it was the most fun he’d ever had in a car, but the best part was during the test itself when in an unguarded moment of pure adrenaline he shouted, ‘I am a driving god!’ Of course, May and Clarkson were in hysterics back at the studio and re-played the tape for extra embarrassment. (Interestingly, all that off-road power translated to a very average Stig lap time of only 1.39.4, perhaps slowed down by the rendition of ‘Stand By Your Man’ on the stereo.)

Hammond is often cited as the ‘kids’ favourite’ from
Top Gear
and this is backed up by his ventures into children’s TV. The first notable foray was as presenter of Sky One’s
Brainiac: Science Abuse
, which he did for four series. He also presented
School’s Out
, an adult quiz show for the BBC, where celebrities are tested
on questions they should remember from school, a similar premise to the hugely successful
Are You Smarter Than A 10 Year Old?
He has since begun to branch out into non-motoring
documentary-length
features, such as
Should I Worry About
…?
,
The Gunpowder Plot: Exploding The Legend
and
Richard Hammond’s Invisible Worlds
. In September 2008, he presented the first episode of
Richard Hammond’s Engineering Connections
on the National Geographic Channel, examining famous inventions such as the Airbus A38 and Wembley Stadium. His most slapstick venture is clearly BBC1’s
Total Wipeout
, where contestants are sent around an assault course of obstacles, mud and water hazards – which is actually filmed in Argentina, although Hammond does all his presenting from a studio in London.

His most popular children’s show is
Richard Hammond’s Blast Lab
for the BBC. Set in a fictitious underground laboratory, apparently beneath Hammond’s stately home, he was joined by such colourful characters as Ninja Nan. Taking a lead from his
Top Gear
‘day job’, Hammond has quite frequently blown up caravans in the name of science for kids.

On
Blast Lab
, there’s an ‘intelligent’ Opel Kadett that comes onto the show and answers kids’ questions by flashing its lights, depending on whether the response is correct or not. This is, in fact, the very same car that Hammond found during the
Top Gear
‘Epic Road Trip’ to Botswana – he loved the vehicle so much that he shipped it back to the UK, where it was restored by a team from
Practical Classics
magazine. On
Blast Lab
, the car is seen with the number plate OLI V3R.

Hammond has also presented several one-off specials, such as the annual Crufts awards; perhaps most bizarrely, he has twice presented the British Parking Awards at the Dorchester Hotel, which includes a variety of categories including ‘Parking Team of the Year’ and ‘Best New Car Park’ – I am not making this up!

No doubt, this must have provided Clarkson and May with much mirth. Presumably he didn’t win an award at The Dorchester: on the BBC2 quiz show,
Petrol-heads
, Hammond was tricked into pranging his classic Ferrari while attempting to parallel-park blindfolded.

Richard regularly contributes numerous newspaper columns to the
Mirror
and is a regular (and always extremely popular) guest on high-profile chat shows; he has also written several
best-selling
books. A sure sign of The Hamster’s exploding personal celebrity came with ITV’s February 2006 launch of
Richard-Hammond’s
5 O’Clock Show
with his co-star, Mel Giedroyc. The topical show aired for an hour across nearly five weeks, but was not re-commissioned. Recently, he has returned to radio with various one-off shows for stations such as BBC2.

Personally, Hammond’s most riveting TV ventures have been two enthralling specials recorded with Evel Knievel and Stirling Moss. The former was a lengthy interview pieced together from numerous meetings with the all-time most famous daredevil stunt rider. Knievel was a childhood hero of mine and, being the same age as Hammond, it was as if he was asking all the questions that I would have wanted to put forward, had I been lucky enough to meet him. At the time of these meetings, Knievel had already been diagnosed with the diabetes and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis that eventually killed him. Hammond was respectful and yet confident enough to ask difficult questions of a man not renowned for suffering fools gladly.

Initially he was visibly nervous on meeting his childhood hero and the entire programme was fascinating to watch. It later transpired this was Knievel’s last interview before his death in November 2007. When Hammond interviewed racing legend Moss, recovering from a horrific fall at home that broke both his
ankles, some bones in his feet and several vertebrae, his respectful reverence was also apparent.

Having started his career in regional radio (and with an academic background behind that), speaking as a fan this is an area that I personally would love to see Hammond investigate further. His
Top Gear
caricature is highly entertaining, but is there a limit to the amiable cheeky chappie persona? Although his own topical magazine show didn’t get renewed, Hammond is at his best when serious, investigative and passionate about his subject. If you asked his co-stars what The Hamster’s best
non-
Top
Gear
TV work has been to date, no doubt they’d say his adverts for fresh fish at Morrisons! Interestingly, he himself admits that he is not always so amiable, telling
www.timesonline.co.uk
that, ‘There is a bit of Italian in my family and I do have a short fuse. I tend to explode and have a huge temper tantrum, but then it is all gone and I’m happy and smiling two minutes later.’

One fact about Richard Hammond that his co-presenters make no secret of finding absurd is that gradually he has become more of a sex symbol, perhaps not something the shy primary school Hamster might have expected. After he grew his hair much longer, his slightly expensively dishevelled appearance seemed to be a hit with female viewers (when May was named ‘Worst Celebrity Haircut’ in a 2007 Brylcreem poll, Hammond’s longer locks triumphed in the ‘Best’ category). As far back as 2005, he topped
Heat
magazine’s list of ‘Weird Celebrity Crushes’. Having said that, his main ‘rivals’ in that unlikely chart included Bob Geldof, Derren Brown and believe it or not, Boris Johnson. In his acceptance speech, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, Richard said: ‘So, I’m the best of a really bad bunch – hoorah! I’m still a little sceptical about all this. After all, I’m the short bloke who was always ignored at school discos. I used to pitch up in a badly
matching flowery shirt and tie, stand on the side of the dancefloor and wait for a girl to come and talk to me – and they never did. Now I’m top of a Z-list nookie league.’

Perhaps more graciously, he went on to say that he thought if women fancied Clarkson, it must be a perversion. In fact, his lanky
Top Gear
colleague has enjoyed some of the apparent reflected
Top Gear
attractiveness: a 2008 poll of ‘Men I Secretly Adore’ placed Jezza third, behind only Jonathan Ross and Philip Schofield! On hearing the news, he complained about not coming first.

A diminutive 5’7”, Hammond has the unfortunate job of working alongside a towering Clarkson, which undoubtedly makes him look far shorter than he actually is. However, he genuinely doesn’t seem to mind: ‘As a pecking order it works quite well,’ he told
Times Online
. ‘If I wasn’t shorter than him, it would just look like two blokes having an argument.’ Of course, Clarkson relentlessly mocks his fellow presenter’s height, most famously by putting pictures on the ‘Cool Wall’ out of Hammond’s reach when they disagree. With stunning
Top Gear
directness, Richard likes to point out that he’s still taller than George Clooney, Tom Cruise and Hitler: ‘In my mind, I look like Clint Eastwood – tall, scary, strong and silent – but women just think I’m fluffy and inoffensive. I’m not cute: I’m miserable, I have a mean, dark heart and I’m sinister!’ He went on to suggest his wife would not call him a romantic, although he once bought her a Harley-Davidson for her birthday. ‘I fancy girls on motorcycles’ was his selfless reasoning for the two-wheel purchase!