As Grand Tour comes to end Richard Hammond opens up on Jeremy Clarkson and plans for future shows
HE may be just 5ft 7in and have a “tiny Birmingham brain” but Richard Hammond has spent the past three decades doing one of TV’s most dangerous jobs.
Yet despite the outrageous stunts on Top Gear and The Grand Tour leaving him constantly terrified, he doesn’t regret a thing because he has forged such a bond with his petrolhead co-host “brothers”.
Richard, 54, and his old muckers Jeremy Clarkson, 63, and James May, 61, will soon be calling time on their partnership after a run of 23 years.
And it is likely, given their reluctance to get emotional, their farewell will be more “firm handshake and appreciative nod” than a full on blub-a-thon.
But speaking exclusively to The Sun, Richard has broken ranks by lauding his co-stars and comparing them to family, saying: “I’m the oldest of three brothers so when we were kids and played Batman, I was Batman, that was that.
“But with us three, who have become brothers on TV for the last 23 years, I’m the youngest and it really took some getting used to.
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“I quite enjoy it and I like that change. Being the oldest of three brothers brings a sense of responsibility sometimes, but being the youngest is great.”
The trio’s penultimate episode of The Grand Tour will launch on Prime Video on Friday.
It sees them cross the Sahara desert, retracing the original route of the Dakar Rally.
“It’s three grown men being idiots once again,” Richard summarises.
Almost telepathic
They take on the challenge of driving through north west Africa in inappropriate motors in the form of open-top sports cars better suited to cruising the streets of Monaco than the world’s biggest desert.
As always, high-speed stunts will be at the show’s heart and the latest episode is one of their scariest yet.
Richard, Jeremy and James find an old runway in Mauritania where they attempt a drag race.
However, unbeknown to them, the stretch of road is still used by local drivers.
This results in some very unwelcome oncoming traffic and cameras inside their vehicles capture the trio’s distressed reactions.
Richard explains: “It’s bonkers, isn’t it? To have an old runway running through the city, which it turns out they still use bits of as a road, was a surprise when we elected to use it.
“Whenever we encounter a runway, that’s what we do — a drag race breaks out. I didn’t know about the traffic.”
He adds: “We spend a lot of our lives being scared doing these things.”
Richard famously suffered two serious accidents while filming shows with Jeremy and James.
In 2006 he was hospitalised after crashing a Vampire Dragster at a speed in excess of 200mph and was put into a coma after filming the segment for the BBC’s Top Gear.
Eleven years later, on the second season of The Grand Tour, Richard crashed a Rimac Concept One at a hill-climb in Switzerland, rolling the car several times and fracturing his knee.
The trio’s decision to end The Grand Tour came a week after the BBC axed Top Gear following Freddie Flintoff’s near-fatal crash.
The accident at Dunsfold Park Aerodrome in December 2022 leaves the car show genre void of two giant much-loved series.
Richard insists he, Jeremy and James have not discussed future projects once The Grand Tour is over, with their final episode likely to air at the end of this year.
He says: “We haven’t made any plans beyond. The key thing with these shows is it’s just us three on screen, but my god it’s a big crew.
“It’s like making a film and the quality of production, you cannot do that without the many skilled people on board, and it’s the same ones who’ve been with us for 20 years.
Any thinking about the end and what comes next is still a long way off as we’re still making the series. It’s a long job
Richard Hammond
“It’s such a vast job, going out and filming. It certainly isn’t the end because there’s three cameras in each of our cars, three film crews travelling with us in separate cars, there’s a drone crew and minicab crew.
“There’s thousands of hours of footage that has to be gone through when we come back once we’ve said ‘wrap’ in the desert.
“So that’s why — and I’m not defecting here — any thinking about the end and what comes next is still a long way off as we’re still making the series. It’s a long job.”
Asked if he envisaged the trio ever working together again on something outside of their comfort zone, such as filming a series about renovating a property in the south of France, he joked: “That’s genuinely not a bad idea, I might make a note of that and claim it as my own.”
But if Richard never works with Sun columnist Jeremy and James again, there is one thing he will miss more than anything — annoying the hell out of them.
In The Grand Tour: Sand Job, he winds them up with his enthusiasm for camping as they spend the night under the stars.
It may sound idyllic, but Jeremy and James had significantly smaller tents, despite their bigger frames, which left them even more aghast.
He explains: “Jeremy is not a natural camper, James neither. But I love it and the more it annoys them that I love it, the more I love it.
“It’s a bit like, years ago, James was kicking off moaning about The Archers on Radio 4, and Jeremy joined in, and whenever I used to drive home or to the studio, always the The Archers would come on.
“I’ll be honest it’s not my favourite thing, but I started listening to it just because it annoyed them. Literally that was it.
“Then I realised I don’t want to be listening to this, but I’m listening to it to annoy them — and camping is sort of the same.”
Richard says their camaraderie on screen flows naturally so there is rarely any need for scripts.
Indeed, they know each other so well they have an almost telepathic understanding.
Richard explains: “We’ve worked together for so long that if something happens we automatically know, unspoken, which one of us is most likely to comment on that and in what way.
“But also if I say something, I can be pretty confident of how the others will come back, and the other way around.
“So there is a lot of artifice and discussion that doesn’t have to happen.”
I was so preoccupied with the idea of a beer that I worried my entire body was going to react at a molecular level
Richard Hammond
Aside from cars, the other big passion the trio share is a love of booze, which made their latest challenge harder than usual.
Indeed, Mauritania is a dry country and the 46°C heat made them all desperate for a beer which they were unable to obtain, even from the British embassy.
Richard says: “After a long day in the desert the only thing you require is a beer, that was the only thing on our minds.
“I was so preoccupied with the idea of a beer that I worried my entire body was going to react at a molecular level — the very things that made me up were going to forget how to remain connected, at an atomic level even.
“Particles would simply fail to connect and I would drift away in a cloud of dust because all I could think of was beer.”
The father-of-two admits the lack of alcohol, coupled with his car — an Aston Martin DB9 Volante — suffering various malfunctions en-route turned him into a madman. The glitches included a constant beeping noise, causing him to spiral and climb on to the car roof and smash it with his fists, Basil Fawlty-style.
He adds of their trip through the desert: “It’s a weirdly claustrophobic world.
“It’s vast, and there’s nobody in it and it’s hot, but it’s just you and your car.
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“And when your car is constantly beeping at you and telling you it’s got problems that it hasn’t really got, it will stack up a bit and my tiny Birmingham brain fried.”
No wonder he’s calling it a day.
DESERT TREK WAS SIZZLING
THE Grand Tour: Sand Job was one of the toughest challenges yet for the show’s veteran hosts.
Not only did they have to put up with the searing heat, desert storms and their cars malfunctioning, they had no clue which country they were filming in.
The African nation of Mauritania, located in the north west of the continent, was the chosen destination, and neither Richard, Jeremy nor James had ever heard of it – despite the country being four times bigger than the UK.
Richard said: “It was new to everybody, we literally had no idea it existed.
“It’s the sort of thing C.S. Lewis would invent, a massive country but an empty one.
“It was like stepping through the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe.”
As well as a drag race, the hosts also turned their cars into water rafts in a bid to cross a river.
They rested the motors on nets filled with empty plastic bottles, which did the trick until they needed to reverse, when the turning wheels drenched them in water.
But being covered in water would have come as a relief, as they struggled to stay hydrated.
However, going to the toilet became a big problem – especially for Jeremy, who compared his urine to the colour of an “old stair bannister” when he finally relieved himself.
Richard added: “The heat was incredible, but we are used to it because we are used to filming in those environments.
“But we did struggle to stay hydrated.
“Usually we’re like ‘Hydration? That’s for millennials, don’t worry about that.’
“But you could watch the water evaporate from them as they drank it – it was that hot.”