Top Gear: It’s Biblically Good

Jeremy Clarkson, Alpha Male

The hosts really make the show. America’s version of Top Gear is set to star Adam Ferrara. He’s no Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson is the ringleader of the show; he’s been there since its inception. He’s loud, crass, and fond of explosives. His favorite tool is the hammer. He is polarizingly opinionated. In fact, he has so many opinions that he has a weekly column in the London Times. He is gleefully politically incorrect, yet quite charming.

Then there’s Richard Hammond. Blessed with fantastic hair and Davy Jones good looks, Hammond is the go-to guy for dangerous and ridiculous things. He has been placed in a car that was submerged in a pool to see how difficult it would be to escape from. He was put in a freezing chamber in a car to see who froze first: car or man. He sustained massive brain trauma in a jet powered Vampire dragster, going 288 mph when the front tire blew out.

Richard Hammond, Daredevil

Yet he recovered and returned to a hero’s welcome on Top Gear and still continues to participate in alarming stunts. If Clarkson is the soul of Top Gear, Hammond is the heart. He clearly loves his job. His book jacket for As You Do describes him as having “boundless optimism in the face of almost certain failure.” He hates to lose. He is game. He is brave. He might be insane.

James May, then, is clearly the brains. Arguably the smartest of the three presenters, May has earned the moniker “Captain Slow” for his careful and deliberate driving style. Still, he pushed the Bugatti Veyron to the top speed of 253.5 mph. Well on his way to becoming a national treasure, he co-presents a wine program in which he and a friend travel to various climes and discuss wines (and subsequently spend much of the program hungover), as well as James May’s Toy Stories, which is an exploration of the toys he loved growing up.

While not conventionally handsome, with hair a bit like Lord Byron’s, and given to a wardrobe full of floral prints and stripes, May has enormous charisma. His wry, self-depreciating humor and encyclopedic knowledge of so many subjects make him the straight man. He began as an automotive journalist (getting fired for putting a vaguely vulgar acrostic in the review section of Autocar magazine) and could very nearly be described as debonair.

James May, Genius

Top Gear thrives on challenges. In early series of the show, Hammond and May were frequently paired up against Clarkson. The first two raced in a plane (piloted by James) against Clarkson in a Bugatti Veyron to deliver a truffle (and they would have beaten him too, had May been licensed to fly after dark).

May and Hammond also changed full sized cars into remote control cars, each driving the other through an obstacle course. The glee on their faces as they did this was absolutely infectious. Hammond and May raced a letter mailed from the Isle of Man in a Porsche Panamera. The two of them, in a car, for multiple hours led to hilarious footage (an outtake on the Top Gear website shows them both repeatedly hitting their heads on the dash mounted camera, much to the other’s mirth). With the help of rocket engineers they turned a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle, which actually took off in a fantastic explosion.

Hammond and May together make some sort of dynamic duo of hilarity and kindness: each tends to stop and help if the other’s car has broken down. May’s tentative plea to Hammond on the “Death Road” of, “Please don’t leave me” was heart rending. Yet when the three presenters get together and cooperate, hijinks ensue.

When they teamed up to build a kit car and race against their tame racing driver, The Stig, tempers were barely controlled. Clarkson’s enthusiastic building style, with a hammer as his primary tool, compared to the others’ actual technical skils caused frustration and swearing, but the end result, when the car was finished and brought to the finish line, was a moment of sheer joy.

One memorable trip explored the British public’s love for caravanning, putting the three of them in a camper together for a weekend. They caused traffic tie ups, crashed the caravan into a post, and ultimately set it on fire in a cooking “accident.” They were not persuaded that caravanning was a reasonable way to spend a weekend under any circumstances.

The Stig

One would be remiss in not mentioning The Stig, the masked racing driver whose identity is a closely guarded secret. His function is to drive the cars as fast possible on the Top Gear track. His films are typically introduced by Clarkson with “facts” about the Stig: “Some say that every week he sheds his entire skin, like a snake and that for some reason he’s allergic to the Dutch.” The Top Gear website lists many of these important facts and makes for ridiculously good reading.

As America gears up to put their own craptastic spin on another perfectly great British TV show (Really? NASCAR commentators? What does that have to do with proper driving?), just knowing that the fellows from Top Gear are still out there, doing often ridiculous, frequently dangerous things all in the name of good telly (and sometimes automotive journalism) makes the world a better place. They’re out there somewhere, driving and yelling at each other, but buying pints at the pub when it’s all said and done.

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