Cookin’ with gas ... and kale
Whether you enjoy the Hamster’s wheel need for speed or prefer the Captain’s Slow-burning approach, there’s no denying Richard Hammond and James May’s driving passion, writes Matt Suddain.
such as May will enjoy its simplicity.
‘‘I don’t play a lot of games, I play flight simulators mostly. But what I like about this is that they made it challenging, but it’s not really nerdy. It doesn’t feel sad. The way they described it to me is it has to look as good as Forza, but it has to have the appeal as Super Mario Bros.’’
As for being involved in the game’s development, he admits they left that to the experts.
‘‘We didn’t have a lot to offer, but in the game you hear us shouting insults in your ear as you play, so we did have to come up with loads of those.’’
He thinks it’s possible the game has shown them a glimpse of things to come.
‘‘Maybe this is the future. Maybe we don’t have to drive real cars at all. Maybe we can just exist as a cyber-entity.’’
Or maybe they could use their new gaming platform to find their eventual successors, in the same way Nissan’s GT Academy used Gran
Turismo to find the next generation of professional racing drivers.
‘‘We always used to say ‘Who would ever replace us?’ Not in a conceited way, just as in ‘I wonder who it will be.’ ’Cos it has to happen. And with the game it turns out it’s everybody. Through the game, everyone becomes us, and they might even improve our show by doing it better.’’
It’s clear, even to motoring stalwarts like these guys, that the industry is heading into the beyond: beyond combustion engines, beyond drivers even, maybe one day even beyond the car itself.
To May, it’s not unthinkable.
‘‘In the short-term you think about hydrogen fuel cells, that kind of thing,’’ he muses.
‘‘I think any carmaker that had a brain and was looking very longterm would think about ‘Personalised Transport Solutions’ – which may not be a car.’’
Hush your mouth.
‘‘No, but it may be a pod that goes through space, or it may be teleportation, who knows? They should be thinking about ‘what’s the next thing going to be?’ in the way that cars replaced horses. What will be after the car?’’
Hammond agrees. ‘‘We get the cars we want. Our audience, all of us, we are the customers, and we will get what we want.
‘‘If it’s electric, if it’s driverless, that doesn’t mean it won’t be exciting. I have to come down the M4 to get to work, so if I can just push a button then have a nap, I’m in,’’ he says.
For now, the show powers on as is, on four wheels, belching petrol fumes and anti-vegetable rhetoric.
After tearing it up old-school-style in Detroit, the team returns to jolly old England where Jeremy drives the super-lightweight, superhardcore, 789-horsepower McLaren Senna around Donnington, because it’s too fast for the tree-lined Eboladrome.
(Donnington, ironically, is in the Midlands, just a few miles from where the bulk of England’s kale is produced.)
The third series of The Grand Tour starts on Friday on Amazon Prime Video
‘‘If you watch a really good TV show you should always think, ‘I reckon these people would be doing this anyway.’ And that’s how ours feels, I hope. I get home on the weekend and I play around with my own cars. It’s what we do. It’s our pastime and our passion.’’ Richard Hammond
Jeremy Clarkson is rumoured to be somewhere in London’s Corinthia Hotel, lumbering from room to room like a buttondown bigfoot. Richard Hammond is waiting for me in room 214, dressed in a tasteful white shirt and waistcoat combo which, with his goatee and ability to sustain eye-contact, make me feel like I’m chatting to an affable stage magician. I keep expecting him to lift a playing card from a hotel ice-bucket and say, ‘‘Is this your card?’’ Instead, he’s happily reminiscing about old times.
‘‘It’s changed so much. It used to be we’d get a hatchback and drive it round for a day, then that’s done. Now we have to go to Mongolia and spend two weeks driving a car we built ourselves. The big thrill is that people still watch and still love what we do.’’
They’ve been to jungles, glaciers, deserts and mountains. It’s got to the point now where he can see old footage and not remember visiting certain places.
‘‘I don’t pay attention very much, that’s the thing. I just turn up at the airport and go to work. But it is amazing watching the montage and thinking, ‘We did all that! Was that this year or last year?’’’
He definitely remembers the live Top Gear shows they did in New Zealand years ago. He remembers how polite the audiences were.
‘‘It was hilarious. It’s like England, but 60 years ago. It’s funny the contrast between you and your nearest neighbours, who are all just baying lunatics in vests.’’
You can take the boys out of the show, but you can’t take the show out of the boys. While the BBC’s reinvented Top Gear has struggled to stay on track, its former hosts have parked comfortably with their new overlords, Amazon.
The Grand Tour is about to premiere its third season on Prime Video, offering more of the motorised hijinks and mild insensitivities that have made the show a global hit.
In episode one, Clarkson, Hammond and James May make a pilgrimage to Detroit to drive three highly-tuned muscle cars with names that sound like a Kid Rock baby name shortlist – Ford Mustang, Dodge Challenger Demon and Hennessey Exorcist Camaro.
The trio express outrage that this once-great motor city now devotes more energy to organic kale than oversized V8s.
It’s unclear why the demise of the American car industry is kale’s fault, but they raise a defiant finger to it, and all brassicas, by staging a drag race through the streets, then turning an abandoned car factory into a racetrack. It’s a lot of fun.
And that’s what the show should be, says Hammond.
‘‘If you watch a really good TV show you should always think, ‘I reckon these people would be doing this anyway.’ And that’s how ours feels, I hope. I get home on the weekend and I play around with my own cars. It’s what we do. It’s our pastime and our passion.’’
There’s been another Clarkson sighting up on the third floor. An intern managed to get a tranquilliser dart into him, though it wasn’t enough to bring him down.
But May is nice enough to meet me in room 225 for a chat. In this season he’ll try to throw off his Captain Slow tag by pitting a Porsche 917 Le Mans – manufactured in the 1970s – against a new-model Porsche he can’t even talk to me about.
‘‘I’m not really supposed to tell you, but it was an electric one,’’ he says.
Yep, an electric car. It’s a slippery slope. What’s next? Public buses powered by kale? Organic unicycles made from hemp and recycled beard oil?
Of the two cars, it was the 1970s model that presented the real challenge, given that it was little more than an engine bolted to an aluminium clothes-rack enclosed in 1.2 mm thick fibreglass, all weighing less than 800kg – around the same weight as a mini.
‘‘If you crash it, you’re dead,’’ May says casually. And given the car is valued at about £15 million (NZ$28m), you’d probably want to be.
May, now 55, has been working in combustion related entertainment for decades but he’s unsure if his advancing age has made him focus more on personal safety.
‘‘I don’t know if it’s safety. I do worry about breaking things. Things that don’t belong to me.’’
Clarkson, meanwhile, has been spotted rummaging through bins behind the hotel kitchen, so it’s unlikely I’ll get to speak to him today.
Instead, they let me spend some time with the new Grand Tour video game.
It’s a standard racing platform in the style of
Gran Turismo or Forza.
Ambitiously, they’ll be releasing new modules with each episode, so fans can attempt the same challenges as the hosts.
As a game, it’s actually not bad. Experienced gamers might find it a bit basic, but casual players
‘‘In the [Grand Tour] game you hear us shouting insults in your ear as you play, so we did have to come up with loads of those. Maybe this is the future. Maybe we don’t have to drive real cars at all. Maybe we can just exist as a cyber-entity.’’ James May