Richard Hammond one of the hosts of the BAFTA and Emmy award winning series Top Gear's Season 22, talks about what’s instore this time. The show will premiere on May 30 at 8:30 pm on AXN
How do you divide the work between the three of you and decide who is going to drive which cars and so on.
If it is a three car drive we will all know roughly what the idea is and individually we will say what we prefer to drive. Quite often it comes out that they are all three different cars. When we did America recently, we had the Mercedes SlS, Ferrari 458 and Porsche GT3 RS, and actually there were logical choices to which we want to drive. Otherwise, it is just a massive argument and sometimes a fight.
Did you ever envisage that years down the line you would be playing car soccer in stadiums around the worldIJ
Absolutely not. I remember some of the very initial conversations that I was involved in were certainly centred around car shows we had all made before, car journalism we had all done before.
We had all sorts of ideas about let's keep it sensible and straight, no super cars, no foreign travel, and then we realised 'but hang on, that's not the way it should be'. What I am trying to say is, there has been no cynicism in the creation of it.
How many people work on the Top Gear programmeIJ
I wouldn’t know the actual figure in the office, it's not a big crowd. There is Andy Wilman who’s the boss. He’s a sort of bald moustache character who wears a cape and a top hat. Floats about the background, manipulating us in a horrible way, and he’s Jeremy’s oldest mate, which is suspicious.
Now Andy is said to have worried at some point that the show was getting a little stale. What are your thoughtsIJ
We are still as enthusiastic as we ever were. I think Andy’s job is very different from my job or the job of a producer. He has a very unique role …this isn't a big team, actually, at its heart, and therefore the personalities at that point are very important. And Andy's personality is the one that he worries like a 24 year-old with his first television commission constantly. .
It was very important to me to see a Porsche could withstand a piano being dropped on the bonnet. That's the kind of thing I look for when purchasing a car.
Well a Porsche can obviously, but a Morris Marina can’t. I just wish it would stop happening, but it just does.