James May 'didn’t really belong' on Top Gear
TV presenter James May has confessed he felt like he "didn’t really belong" on Top Gear or The Grand Tour but admits that's why the format "worked".
James May felt like he "didn’t really belong" on Top Gear or The Grand Tour.
The TV presenter was catapulted to fame when he joined Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond as a co-host of the BBC motoring show back in 2003 and they went on to make their own series, The Grand Tour, for Amazon Prime Video after walking away from Top Gear - and James now admits the differences between them all was what made the line-up work.
He told The Times newspaper: "If we [Clarkson, Hammond and May] had been at school together, we’d have been in different gangs.
"That’s actually why it worked. I have looked back at Top Gear, and The Grand Tour, and thought in many ways I didn’t really belong on it.
"But that’s exactly why I was on it. It needed one of each of us for it to work."
May had previously failed an audition for Top Gear in 2002 but was brought back in a year later after he found himself at an event in France with Clarkson and the pair ended up "bickering" over the car they had gone to see.
He explained: "I had met Jeremy at the launch of the new Audi A4 Cabriolet in France. There was nothing about the car we agreed on, but Jeremy thought the bickering would be ideal for Top Gear.
"All I remember about that trip where I drove with Jeremy was that he bought some gargoyles from an antiques shop. Jeremy said: 'Can you give me a hand to lift my gargoyles into the car?' I thought, that’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever done on a car launch."
May and Hammond left Top Gear after the BBC decided not to renew Clarkson's contract in 2015 and they went on to make The Grand Tour together for Amazon.
The Grand Tour came to an end in September 2024 with the aptly-titled episode One for the Road, in which the trio traveled across Zimbabwe in cars they always wanted to own. It marked the end of a 22-year collaboration between the former Top Gear co-hosts.
However, May recently hinted there could be one more special in the future because he's always wanted to take the show to Malaysia and the Philippines.
Speaking to the Oxford Mail newspaper, he said: "The one bit we never really went to, and it’s a bit of the world I have never been to, is sort of everything between Southeast Asia and Australia.
"Malaysia, the Philippines and all that sort of whole strip of stuff. I've never been to any of that as far as I can remember, and I don't really know anything about it.
"We never came up with a good reason for going there, which is a shame really, because just about everywhere else we went."
May even had an idea for the episode - that the trio could buy the "cheapest car you could locally", because he thinks driving "terrible cars" makes much better TV than "really nice" motors.
He added: "I always wanted to do a trip where we bought the cheapest car you could locally, which is an idea that works everywhere.
"It would work in Britain, it would work in the States, and it would also work in the bits of Africa we went to, as well as Southeast Asia, India, and so on. "There's always a subculture of incredibly knackered cars that somehow keep going, and they make the best material.
"Driving terrible cars is always much more interesting than driving really nice ones."
