by Martin Roach
Meanwhile, Hammond and May stumbled about doing lengthy pre-flight checks on the Cessna. In October 2006, James had obtained a light aircraft pilot’s licence having trained at White Waltham Airfield. Here at the airport he was filmed at ease and enjoying himself, while Hammond was frustrated and impatient to get airborne. This episode as good as any portrays their hilarious ‘double act’, the perfect foil for Clarkson’s ‘bad guy’ image – a motoring Laurel and Hardy, if you will.
After leaving Italy, Clarkson headed into ‘car hating’ Switzerland and was so confident about victory that he stopped off for tea – although the feature notably doesn’t mention the number of petrol stops he would have had to make (using Bugatti’s own statistics, the car’s petrol consumption is between eight and thirteen miles per gallon, falling to three miles per gallon at higher speeds). He also takes up time phoning for an insurance quote, only to find that the ‘happy’ man on the other end of the line thought the Bugatti was a Rover! Because the car didn’t come with a Bluetooth device – standard even in most cheap cars these days – Clarkson had to wear one of those annoying ear-pieces to make this call. For the purposes of this book, the author successfully obtained a quote for a Bugatti and if you drive like a nun and have never had a speeding ticket of any description, it would set you back just over £25,000 a year!
The comedy was ramped up as Hammond berated the ramshackle plane while May then admitted he had had to land because he was not qualified to fly in the dark. James himself has owned two planes: a Luscombe 8A Silvaire (now sold) and an American Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon, allegedly with the registration number G-OCOK, a crafty reference to his catchphrase (such as it is) on the show of ‘Oh, cock!’
After revealing May’s night-time flying curfew, a frantic rush to the Eurostar and eventually a Routemaster ‘dash’ across London ensued, only for the duo to discover that Clarkson had already arrived at the restaurant at the top of the NatWest Tower with enough time to spare to order a pint and his pasta … with truffles, of course.
Then Clarkson summed up what he calls ‘the best car ever made’ in what is probably his greatest-ever impassioned speech with the words: ‘It’s a hollow victory, because I’ve got to go for the rest of my life knowing that I’ll never own that car; I’ll never experience that power again.’ Mind you, Jeremy’s now so successful and famous that maybe one day that will change. So, was James May suitably impressed by all this hyperbole? No, he was asleep …
As an aside, this trip is a great example of how seamlessly edited Top Gear can be. When you step back from the exciting race, you have to ask how they get the shots of the car speeding along picturesque roads, or in this case the footage of May flying his ‘toaster with wings’, as it was called. The simple answer is that after the presenters have completed their actual race, the film crew go back and painstakingly shoot footage to embellish the programme’s aesthetics. Clarkson has gone on record to state that the programme’s races are never fixed and cited one example of a cameraman having to urinate in a bottle because there was no opportunity to slow down and relieve himself properly. In this case, the Bugatti was deemed so powerful that they actually sent The Stig to safely complete the extra footage.
As we have seen, in a later article for The Sunday Times, Clarkson intimated he’d actually tried to take the Veyron to its top speed of 253mph, but had run out of road at 240mph. Given the only roads in Europe where those speeds are legal are on the Autobahn in Germany, we can only presume that’s where he took a detour to try out the full force of Bugatti’s masterpiece.
The next time we see the team playing with the Veyron is when Top Gear wanted to test out its claimed top speed of 253mph. So who was chosen for this task? Why, the man christened Captain Slow, of course: James May. Actually, he did have ‘previous’. In fact, James has travelled faster than any of the other presenters, reaching 1,320mph in a RAF Eurofighter Typhoon for his programme, James May’s 20th Century. He’s even been to the edge of space, travelling in a Lockheed U-2 spy plane to a height of 70,000 feet, which also makes him one of the highest humans in history, other than actual spacemen.
So in Series 9, Episode 2, May found out if the Veyron did exactly what it said on the tin and achieved that ridiculous speed of 253mph. This makes James May one of the fastest drivers in history, even including professional racers. Bugatti are rumoured to have a little book of those who they can confirm have achieved such a speed.
James had, in fact, topped 200mph several times before in numerous supercars on the show but this was far more bizarre: ‘What I found weird about it, and this will seem absurd, is that 253mph feels a lot faster than 200mph,’ he revealed in the Daily Mail, ‘At 250, it suddenly gets to the point where things are happening faster than you can process the information.’ Yet he became so accustomed to the staggering top speed that he found when he’d slowed right down to 70mph that it felt so pedestrian that he almost opened the door and got out, while waiting for it to roll to a halt. He maintains the Veyron’s engineering is so perfect that reaching such a speed was in fact relatively easy.
May is making light of his achievement, however. Speaking exclusively for this book, the eminent neuroscientist and motorsport expert Dr Kerry Spackman explained why driving at such prodigious speeds is deceptively difficult: ‘It’s not just the sheer speed, it’s the visual richness coming by. So if you’re in a jumbo jet going 500mph, and you’re looking out of the window at this great big fluffy cloud in the distance going by, it’s no big deal because it’s not visually rich, the clouds are big and they go past at a distance. However, when you’re close to the ground and certain things are going by at a very high speed, your brain gets overloaded. What tends to happen then is you get tunnel vision where everything outside a certain area isn’t processed: you can see it but your brain just decides there’s just too much going on out there; all it can really focus on is what’s immediately in front of it in a small area. So you can see everything but you can’t do anything with that vision, the brain says it’s all too complicated to deal with.
‘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 al
together 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 …
CHAPTER 14
Richard Hammond, Part II
There’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 i
con, 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.