Richard Top Gear Article

[devil-may-care]

Richard has a bit of a problem with his 'new' lambo.


www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/hammond-dreams-2011

[aeromanda]

Does that mean that the Lambo can't go on the lap board? It didn't get over the speed hump without damage. But I guess it technically got over the speed hump so it is still a road car. Yes?

[devil-may-care]

They've never mentioned whether or not 'damage' was acceptable when driving over a 'sleeping policeman'. Just tht it got over it. But according to Richard, he's had several cars that have incurred damage. Hmmm...

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond on: Horses


Despite my love of horsepower, I'm not an especially horsey person, but my wife Mindy is. Her latest toy is a New Forest pony called Tom. He's a nice enough horse; stands about all day in the field eating the carpet, that sort of thing. But I watched him arriving at our house, and as he stepped from the lorry into his new home, something remarkable happened that might, I think, point the way to a revival of the horse as a primary means of transport.

We are blessed at our house with a pet peacock called Humperdinck, who struts about and eats seeds and that's it, really. Sadly, Humperdinck's best friend Engelbert, fell out with a fox and lost the ensuing fight. So, Humperdinck is a bit lonely these days and skulks around, pecking at the lawn and occasionally summoning up the energy to hoick his tail feathers in the air and shake his arse about so his plumage rattles and intimidates the ducks. Fun, I guess, if that's what's available to you. He was doing this just the other side of the fence as Tom arrived.

A horse, as you probably know, when not eating or crapping, is generally busy being scared of stuff. If it's not grass then it might be a threat, so run away. That's the motto. A peacock definitely isn't grass and with its tail feathers erect and shaking violently, looks as big as a sabre-toothed tiger. Safely on the other side of the fence, I braced in anticipation of Tom taking off and dragging my wife with him on the end of the lead rope, like an engineer with his tie caught in the door of a Harrier. But Tom didn't take off. He looked up at the noise, saw the peacock, tipped his head and carried on chewing.

Humperdinck worked himself into a frenzy of arse-shaking at a duck; the duck wandered off in search of some peace; Humperdinck forgot to put his tail away, distracted by an especially juicy seed in the lawn, and just the other side of the fence, Tom watched and chewed. As Humperdinck put his little head down, smacking his lips at the prospect of the morsel ahead of him, Tom took a step towards him. The peacock swallowed the seed - they don't chew, not at all - and moved towards another that had caught his beady little black eyes. Tom walked closer, his head still on one side, eyes captivated by the bird. Mindy followed, holding the loose lead rein in one hand and her own gaping jaw with the other. This, we agreed after, was a pivotal moment.

Allow me to digress even further, if you will: despite the crazy convictions of a billion equestrian enthusiasts, horses are not the wise, mythical forest creatures that trotted and flew through their childhood dreams. They are large, simple things that eat grass. Nothing wrong with that; it's the role nature chose for them and they do it very well. But I, for one, would get bored immediately, were I a horse.

Standing on your own salad all day while hordes of flies reduce your undercarriage to ribbons is neither fun nor mentally stimulating enough to keep even the simplest of humans - me - entertained. But, to the horse, that's life, and it just gets on with it. As long as someone locks it in a dark room at night, so it's not eaten by wolves, and is there again in the morning to let it out and clean up the poo from its mattress, all is well in the horse's world.

You eat grass, crap and stay out of the way of predators. You don't have to worry about whether this is the best kind of grass or your mate's got some better stuff. Life and everything going on around it can be boiled down into two categories: "nice", because you can eat it or "nasty", because it might eat you. Why bother with anything else? Curiosity, you see, killed the cat, not the horse.

Clearly, what was happening here though, was the horse was curious; he wanted to know what the thing with the rattly arse was. A peacock can be of no possible use to a horse; it can't eat a peacock and, given the apparent size of Humperdinck at the time, it could very well be a predator. But as it showed no inclination towards predating, Tom felt he'd check it out and see what it might be. This can mean only one thing. Assuming Tom isn't a Fairy Prince transformed into a horse by a witch, then his newfound curiosity indicates that horses are changing; they are suddenly evolving. Fast. And this could be harnessed and developed to our own ends.

I propose keeping them in the dark all day, to see if they might quickly evolve some sort of luminescent glands on their heads, like a glow-worm's tail, to act as headlights. And, if I were every day to nudge a USB jack into his flank, might he not evolve a USB point for my phone? Horse fuel is plentiful and cheap, shoes are cheaper than tyres and the emissions are brilliant on roses. And if they're no longer going to be terrified of anything that isn't grass, we stand a chance of staying on them. Everybody wins. All hail, Tom, herald of an evolutionary horse revolution.

This column was originally published in the November 2013 issue of Top Gear magazine

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/richard-hammond-top-gear-magazine-column-november-2013-11-29

[RedMoon11]

Hammond on: Second-Hand Cars



Every time a news story calls for comment from someone with an equestrian leaning, we are treated to the drawling hee-haws of some tweed-draped chinless toff with more breeding than sense. My wife is very much of an equestrian bent; for her, every day starts in a flurry of mud, drizzle and manure as she scrapes her beloved nags' soiled mattresses clean and turns them out for yet another day of standing around in their own salad and damaging my chequebook.

But Mindy is definitely not in the category of equestrian fanatic with which the nation's news outlets seem preoccupied. She possesses some tweed clothing, yes, but it's so caked in the mulchy outpourings of her four-legged charges' hyper-productive arses as to be unrecognisable as such.

She doesn't have a Home Counties accent; neither can she make chutney, use a horsewhip with any sort of conviction or warble in church with the power and vibrato of a road drill. She does, however, posses a chin. All of which shortcomings and qualities should leave her standing out among the horsey folk like a clown at a funeral.

But the reality is far from it. She blends seamlessly; these horsey types are, by and large, as ordinary as the rest of us. And as for the impeccable standards that their imagined nobility and upper-class sensitivities might be expected to bring... well, not to put too fine a point on it, that's horsecrap. Far be it for me to decry an entire slice of society, bound together by a shared enthusiasm, but many of those with whom my wife and I have had dealings over the years - whenever it's come time to replace a child's undersized pony or overly dead one - have gone about their business with the ruthlessness of a gangster-movie diamond fence.

Mindy and I enjoy reading the ads in the back of her horsey magazines and imagining what the truth might be behind each gaily-scribbled description. A pony sold as perfect for a child turns out to be a cross between a sabre-toothed tiger and Hitler. "Hacks out alone and in company" can be taken to mean "psychopathic, unreliable, unfriendly and best served in a burger bun." "Good to shoe, box and clip" is a favourite from the horsey ads. Roughly translated, it might mean "an evil, foul tempered creature who will, if you try to load him into a lorry, kill you and, if possible, your children." Past experiences of standing in a field and watching as our recently acquired ‘saint' transforms miraculously into a frothing lunatic bent on murder makes the horse market a scary place to wander through. All facts that I have bandied about readily when in the throes of our occasional marital clashes over the merits of wheels versus quadrupeds.

I have, albeit inadvertently, joined the ranks of the lowest and meanest of dodgy dealers

By comparison, I have argued, the car and bike world is populated by decent, upstanding folk of impeccable standards who want only to allow one another to share in the pleasure of owning whatever wondrous old vehicle they are selling. So vigorously have I defended the car enthusiasts of this world as icons of fair dealing and honesty that it was rather awkward this month to discover that I have, albeit inadvertently, joined the ranks of the lowest and meanest of dodgy dealers, be it of horses, cars or weapons of mass destruction. Mortified does not cover it.

Finding that a particular vehicle was no longer getting the regular use and attention it required to remain fit and, to use a horsey phrase, ‘up-together' I decided to move it on, and replace it with something I might use more often. As I was due to be away working for a while, I placed the matter in the hands of a friend who would, he assured me, sell it and, better still, put the resulting influx of wedge to good use in a couple of other motoring projects. Brilliant. Vehicle duly handed over. Matter forgotten. Until a letter arrived - quite an angry letter.

It seems that my mate had, unbeknownst to me, gone off and got a bit dizzy with the description in the advert. The buyer was less than chuffed to discover the thing hadn't actually been the subject of the forensic rebuild they had taken my mate's advert to suggest, and so had taken to a keyboard to vent what turned out to be a considerable geyser of fury at the previous owner of the car - me.

Fair dos, I had sold it, albeit indirectly, and it fell to me to fix it. A refund was rejected, and so there seemed little alternative left open to me other than to stump up the readies to have the thing put more or less into the state the eager new buyer had anticipated finding it in when it was bought. This would simply be a useful little life lesson were it not for the fact that I'm now in the market for another old car and am completely paralysed with fear and paranoia. I've always floated into dealerships and private sales as gullible and innocently happy as a newborn koala. Now, though, I'm skulking about in a grey cloud of suspicion and mistrust. It's rather spoiling the experience. I might as well buy a bloody horse.

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/richard-hammond-top-gear-magazine-article-february-2014-03-13

[RedMoon11]

Hammond on: Time Travel and Motorbikes



The sensible thing would be to take it off the road in winter, then recommission it in time for the balmy weeks of summer. Then again, the sensible thing would be to accept that a 38-year-old, 49cc moped is neither useful nor image-enhancing and throw the thing in a skip.

But no, every year, come January's bleak offensive, I drag my 1976 Yamaha FS1e out of the garage, coax the stubborn little two-stroke into life and brave the wintery onslaught to ride it down to the MOT station. It would be easy to register it as SORN and put it back on the road when the blizzards and gales have retreated. But, no, braving the weather is all part of the experience.

I didn't have the option at 16 of putting the moped in the shed and dragging out the Discovery until the weather improved, so why should I now?

I'll not try to deny that owning a sixteener special moped from my youth is a shamelessly misty-eyed, rose-tinted piece of sentimental nostalgia: it is. I can't think of any other reason for running a vehicle that makes even me look like a clumsy elephant on a child's toy and has less pulling power (considerably less, in fact) than my lawnmower - in every sense of the phrase ‘pulling power'.

But, as I rode the four miles into Ross-on-Wye, braving sleet and a wind-chill factor, even at a paltry 30 miles an hour, of minus a million, it was genuinely and completely worth it.

I always thought the prize for ‘most evocative form of road transport' should go to vans. Every journey I make at the wheel of a van is immediately and directly connected to every other I have ever made. They might be separated by several decades, but one drive in a van flows seamlessly from the last, as though I had only stopped off for a newspaper.

It might be the upright driving position, the sense of purposefulness of it or the drone of the diesel reverberating through the metal carcass, but driving a van to move from one shabby bedsit to another as a careless, footloose 18-year-old feels exactly the same as driving one to transport a vintage motorcycle home as a 44-year-old with a mortgage and a wrinkled forehead. But the moped is, it turns out, an even more effective form of time travel.

A mile into the voyage to Ross, the engine note's frantic shrieking fell away to a merely desperate buzz as the revs dropped, and I assumed I was at the start of a lengthy but determined breakdown. I wondered if I would die in the rain at the side of the road of hypothermia or shame first. And then I worked out the problem.

An uphill slope of perhaps two degrees from perfectly flat was too much for the little thing, and it couldn't find the power to drag us up it. Dropping a gear solved the problem, and the air was once again filled with the same desperate and hysterical two-stroke thrashings of Yamaha's finest, even though the speed had now dropped away to something best measured by timing the intervals between lamp-posts with a calendar.

I was seamlessly transported back nearly 30 years. The rain fell, the engine shrieked, the speed fell away, and then rose again majestically, and I ticked off the increments as it strained up to and just past 40mph in a crazy, headlong dash into town.

I dodged potholes that would swallow my skinny front wheel whole, I weaved around puddles that would bring me to a total stop, I smelled the thick, blue trail of two-stroke smoke streaming behind me and I was exactly the same guy I was at 16, right hand welded to the twist-grip that could send my teenage howl of rebellion shrieking into the grey sky.

I watched for cars coming up behind me, accepting that even the dreariest of hatchbacks piloted by the most ancient of shoppers could easily pass me, and I felt a sting of indignation as they did so, but I responded with a snarl and a sneer, ducking my head a little further out of the slipstream and bracing my shoulders against the handlebars' writhing as the front wheel tramlined and skipped on the suddenly brutal road surface.

This was time travel, a perfect and flawless reconnection with a past me, thanks to just a few scraps of metal and a bottle of two-stroke oil.

Nurses are being asked to wear fat suits, the better to appreciate what life is like for their morbidly obese patients. A good thing, probably; empathy and sympathy being an important part of their noble jobs, and all that.

I think that motorists should be forced to ride a puny moped every now and then, the better to appreciate what life is like for the scooter-bound.

Far from taking the Yamaha off the road, I have found it a friend. A Honda SS50 of the same year as my Yamaha FS1e was dug out of a mate's shed where it had lain dormant for 15 years. It's in pieces now, as I begin stripping and rebuilding it.

And, best of all, my daughter Izzy is helping me, and, as we work, she talks excitedly about the day she gets to learn to ride it round the garden, and I picture her laying down the markers that she will one day reconnect with in the far, far future.

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/Hammond-on-time-travel-2014-03-31

[Flying Lady]

I think it is unutterably sweet that he and his daughter have a pet motorcycle project. When I was a kid her age, my Dad used to let me tinker in his workshop, the upshot of which is that by 17 I was able to rebuild the engine for my Volkswagen! I have a lot of happy memories of being up to my armpits in grease and foreign car parts. I suppose his Izzy will have some wonderful memories of fettling with her Dad, too.

[RedMoon11]

Hammond on: Family Cars

Some things always remain the same. Like the hideous mess kids make of a car's rear seat

I never went to university. I wish I had, though. Mostly because I'm not very good at arguing, and a few years of hanging with bright, brainy types debating stuff might have refined my technique away from the petulant, sulky frenzy I deploy today when challenged on anything from career issues to a dinner menu.

Recently though, I thought I'd managed, for once, to carry out the sort of measured, tactical move I so envy among the better-educated: I conceded a battle. It had raged on for years and concerned my wife, my daughters and our family car. The car in question has changed over time; it's been a Defender, an old Volvo, an aged Range Rover, another Defender and is now a Discovery. What hasn't changed, though, is the state of it.

The seats morph from cloth to leather, but the mulchy mass of sandwich boxes, chocolate wrappers, hairbands, hockey socks, old magazines and varied, unidentified, organic matter slowly rotting on top of and around those seats has retained a remarkable consistency over the years... as though an outgoing family car were simply mucked out into the new one to maintain familiar continuity, like a favourite compost heap. I have railed against this: complained, shouted, moaned and whined. And to no effect.

My darling wife and equally darling daughters have carried on conducting their experiment in materials decomposition during the daily school run.

On the rare occasion I have driven alone in the family car, I have been haunted by rustlings and hisses from the back seat - there are life forms evolving under there, I'm sure of it, and I think I heard something whisper my name under the back seat once. It's scary. But more scary still is the response, should I choose to complain. Everyone's car is, I am told, like this. Which cannot be true, I counter, because if it were so, then society could not have successfully kept the plague in check.

But, this week, I gave in. I conceded, I swallowed my fatherly pride and declared that, yes, that was just how a family car ends up and that I would put up with it in future without complaint. I attached a small but significant caveat to my concession - they could keep the car in whatever state they chose, but they would keep it for 25 years. I would not, I announced, be replacing our expensive and once very smart Discovery until 2039. And by this move, I figured I had conceded a battle, but with an eye to winning the war. We went out that day as a family. We played crazy golf, visited a butterfly farm and got lost in a hedge maze. We got back in the car to come home. And I learned that the war had long since been lost anyway and I was fighting in the name of something incomprehensible to them.

Izzy, my eldest at 13, climbed into the car along with the rest of us, though separate on account of earphones connecting her head to her iPhone. We drove off. Music played on the stereo, we chatted, usual family stuff. Izzy asked if I knew where her phone was. I rustled through the debris in the door bin, fearful of losing a finger to some dreadful, snapping creature living its life in the dark and filthy debris. Will.i.am played on the stereo, while I searched. And then Jason Derulo took over.

"But we're listening to your phone on the stereo, aren't we? It's Bluetoothed to the dash."

"Yeah, I know, but I need the phone itself to send a text."

"But..."

She had climbed on board, flipped out her earplugs as the phone had reconnected itself to the car and played her music through the stereo. Then the phone had got lost in the jumble of garbage at her feet and now she wanted it to send a message. It was a seamless transition: music through earplugs, get in car, music carries on in car. I can spend 20 minutes faffing about to hook up my phone to the car and then a further 20 trying to make it play my music through the stereo. Or I might spend 10 minutes rifling for a CD.

The idea of a CD is inconceivable to Izzy and her contemporaries. Music is not something that manifests itself physically in any way, apart from making people dance at parties. There is no ‘thing', no disc, no cover art, no physical realisation of your favouring of a particular artist or band. I grew up with my music collection as a real, physical thing, something to be transferred between bedsits and flats. It would be displayed somewhere prominent, where I knew a visitor would be forced to loiter, eyes scanning the colours and text on the sharp spines of the CD cases for clues about me.

I could tell people my aspirations and sensitivities through my record collection. Choice of CD was as revealing as a person's choice of car. A beat-up VW Beetle full of Joni Mitchell CDs signalled something very different from an old Land Rover full of heavy metal. Izzy's music is just something that's always there. She buys tracks on her phone, but they can never be seen or touched. They follow her around in the ether, transferring seamlessly from her headphones to the speakers in the car. The music is just there, around her, because she likes it.

The idea, then, that a car is precious and important because it might be used to signal information about yourself is, and possibly always will be, entirely alien to her. It's significant only in the sense that she goes through a door in one place and gets out again where she wants to be. Maybe she and her contemporaries will always view them the same way they think of their music: it's just something that's always there. You wouldn't want to touch it, to hold it in your hand or to look at it, it's just handy when you need it. Oh my God, I need to get out in my Mustang, now...

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/Richard-Hammond-on-family-cars-2014-05-07

[RedMoon11]

Hammond on: Your Car Choice

After a recent trip to the States, Hammond tries to work out what your car says about you



I have been working in the States again - I know, I know, "There he goes, the cowboy boot-wearing, Mustang-driving son of a gun wannabe Yank" - but wait, please, because my point is just how foreign the place is to British eyes. It's the small things that make it so. I grew up in suburbia, in a world of carriage lamps and corner plots, fancy lawns, bird tables, lawnmowers, Sunday best and paper rounds. Over the thousands of hours spent playing in the culs-de-sac and avenues around our home and the miles I cycled weekly to deliver the papers to my neighbours, I grew familiar with the cues and clues that bristle across the suburban sprawl.

Attached, semi-detached, detached, terrace, town house, maisonette: a spread of ranks as obvious as uniform insignia. But then the subtler clues, the white flecks in a tarmac drive, the wishing well in a corner-plot lawn, the double drive, double garage, sun awning, broken porch window, bottle-glass bay and permanent patio barbecues that marked out those with a bit more, a bit less or who were a bit different. But different or less or more only within the tight confines of what suburbia made available to us. Suburbia becomes a language in itself, as complex, subtle, closed and coded as any other language. Which is why, running through Beverley Hills, I came over all dizzy with disorientation.

The clues were there, I was aware of them; some houses had sprinklers on the lawn, some had them working on the grass outside their property, some had low walls of fancy stone, or huge, wooden doors, or a basketball hoop over the double garage. The clues and cues bristle just as energetically as they did in suburban Solihull where I grew up; but I couldn't read them. I don't speak American suburbia, and so anything they might tell me about the residents' status, past, careers or ambitions was lost to me. What does a balcony with a cast-iron railing signify? And is it ‘correct' to have furniture permanently in place on what looks like a veranda overlooking the road, or is it a sign of slovenly sloppiness as telling as an old refrigerator in the hedge outside 22 Acacia Avenue, Swindon? And this whole language barrier is more baffling outside of the houses and the estates. Because if suburbia is hard to read, it is, at least, only one specific type of territory that is closed to the outsider. Cars, though, are everywhere, and the American carscape is as baffling and coded to us outsiders as its suburbia, but it's more far-reaching.

I don't know what I can assume about the driver of a white, US-made minivan, beyond that they might need some space for stuff, kids probably. What can I tell about a young male driving up a mountain road in an old German saloon, a middle-aged woman in an orange Jeep Wrangler in the city or a college kid in a brand-new Korean SUV? These people are doubtless signalling things about themselves as frantically as a middle-aged accountant driving through London with the roof down on his Jaguar XKR, but I don't know what they're saying.

I don't believe there is a single aspect of our lives into which we pour more effort and concern with what we are signalling to others than we do with our choice of car. Whatever our budget, it's a hardened soul indeed who opts for a car on practical grounds only, without giving a thought to what it might tell others of their status, style, aesthetic, environmental concerns, physical prowess or potency. And in seeking out a car that signals nothing at all, they will have projected something about themselves anyway. Which makes cars a powerful insight into people around us.

We pull on a pair of jeans or a shirt or a pair of work boots without thought, they're just what we have to wear to get on with our daily life. Yes, clothes are subject to fashions, but that just has the effect of restricting the choice of jeans, shirt, suit or boots available to us in the high street. Fashion being the fleeting, flimsy thing it is, we can toy with an idea, try out a flowery shirt or a different skirt and then decide it did, or didn't, work and move on. A car though, is a far more significant purchase; it's likely to be around for a while and we're going to be stuck with whatever message it sends about us through our time with it.

No wonder that we become paralysed with fear and paranoia. We sift through whatever car options our budget permits us and are, on rare occasions, even so misguided and scared as to listen to muppets such as us on Top Gear for advice on what would be the ‘right' car. I've had to use a hire car while over here, and it's a Chevrolet something or other SUV in white. It has aircon, 4WD and an auto, of course, but what the hell does it say about me? What am I telling the world as I merge with the traffic to queue out of town, trying to instil some concept of lane discipline among the drivers around me? That I'm a Brit working abroad and haven't a clue how things work round here? Got it. Told you; you're always signalling something with your car, even when you're trying not to.


www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/Hammond-on-car-choice-2014-09-06

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond on: Talking Cars

Cars communicating to tell drivers where there are jams or clear motorways? Sounds good to us...

July 21, 2014


Some Americans at a university in Virginia are working on cars and 
bikes that will talk to each other. Not shoot the breeze about the weather, obviously, but share information about who is where, doing what and how fast they’re doing it. No doubt there are other boffins about the world working on similar systems. The theory being that a motorcycle, say, will be able to pull up at a junction and it will automatically know that a car 
is coming along the road it’s about to cross.

V clever. And about time too. It’s not as though this technology isn’t already around. I can navigate by satellite on my bike, there are cars you can switch on to preheat while you’re still in bed and people can use their mobiles to see if there are other people in the area who fancy hooking up for a meal and chat.

I simply cannot see how it has taken so long for us to equip our cars and motorcycles with the exact same kinds of technology that might save lives, time and fuel and make our lives better. And while I’m on the subject, why can’t the same people turn their attention to motorway information boards? They’re rubbish. I’ve never believed anything any of them has told me. Which means on the one occasion they tell me that there is a massive delay ahead 
or a rampaging Godzilla is coming the other way, 
and there actually is a massive delay ahead or a rampaging Godzilla is coming the other way I shall ignore it as I always do and barrel headlong into the jam or Godzilla’s evil clutches. It’s the information age, for pity’s sake, so let’s share it.

If cars and bikes can warn one another that they are coming round the corner, then they can tell one another how fast, how good the brakes are and surely, how lively or dopey the codger or bright young thing at the wheel manages to be as a rule... and whether said car or bike reckons there’s a cat’s chance in hell of them pulling up before a crash. Driving could be monitored by the car; events analysed and the information stored and cached ready for broadcast to others in the vicinity.

Information about traffic delays, jams or, 
better still, empty stretches of motorway could be shared in nanoseconds and distributed to vehicles heading for that area. So why the bloody hell isn’t 
it happening? An app for your phone costs what, 49p? So don’t tell me the software is expensive. And we regularly set off on the school run in a 
car with a hundred times the computing power 
of a lunar landing mission of a few decades ago, 
so the software can be absorbed as easily as an 
M&M can be by a 10-year-old.

There will, inevitably, be objectors. I believe they will divide into two schools. There will be those who claim it is an infringement of their human rights 
to have their driving, journeys and locations monitored by the car and the resulting data made available to others on the network, wherever and whoever they are.

So what? Unless you are a spy – and if you were, you wouldn’t tell anyone, obviously – then who gives a damn about where you’re going or when? If it’s useful for another driver to know 
that my car is in a massive jam on the A40 at Gloucester and it might be better diverting round the M50, what skin is it off my nose?

They might be rushing to deliver a baby or put out a fire. Yes, I might be more sensitive about it if I were regularly making runs to dispose of nuclear waste in a top-secret plant, but I suspect these things are taken care of separately under special conditions. Your school run, office commute, supermarket dash or Sunday run in the country are, I’m afraid, of naff all interest or use to me or anyone else.

And the same goes for all of us, but the prevailing traffic conditions, precise positioning of your car on the road I’m about to join and a rough estimate of your ability to spot me on my bike and avoid or brake in time are, naturally, of immense interest, so why not share them?

The second school of objectors will mither 
on about how they resent the interference, the suggestion that a machine knows better than them: that their decades of hard-earned experience won in the real, organic world is somehow of less value than a massive, nationally linked network of live, comprehensive, real-time data distributed and shared among every 
car on the road and updated constantly in nanoseconds to become a vast, shared intellect.

Yeah, well it is better, so just suck it up and stop moaning. I, for 
one, will not be able to contain myself. I can’t wait to set out in my ageing Mustang or on my old Norton, both without a brain of any semblance, let alone access to a global, digital brain of advanced interconnectivity.

I shall arrive at junctions, and my soul will vibrate with the thrill of timing for myself the exact moment I should pull out. I shall make my own decisions about routes, and stand by those decisions when I sink into a mire of traffic. Unless I need to get anywhere: in which case, I shall hook up, press GO and join in with the rest. What’s wrong with that?

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/hammond-column-2014-7-21

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond on: Car Geeks

Car knowledge is power, but use it wisely or keep schtum, says Hammond

Sep 22, 2014

One of the team making our telly show – I shan’t name him (it’s Richard Porter) – knows everything there is to know about cars. It’s as simple as that. His mind is largely a device for storing information about cars. He can tie his own shoelaces, operate a computer and he recently became a father, so he has other functions too, but mostly his brain is a sort of fleshy cupboard for car trivia... although this nameless man (it’s Richard Porter) would refuse to recognise the automotive clutter in his head as trivia.

There’s so much of it in there that sometimes it spills out spontaneously. Should a question regarding an old Cortina or the designer of an Italian bumper crop up in a planning meeting, this man (it’s Richard Porter) has absolutely no control over his mouth.
He simply supplies the answer. Immediately. It’s 
a reptilian response as automatic as a crocodile’s mouth snapping shut on its prey. Only a crocodile doesn’t make itself look like a tit when he does it.

I’ve counselled this man (his name is Porter, Richard Porter) against these outbursts, pointing 
out that in any social situation beyond a Top Gear planning meeting, which leaves a pretty broad spectrum of situations really, showing himself to be 
a man whose head houses a Big Book of Car Facts instead of an actual mind, leaves him open to accusations of anorakacy and chumpishness of the first order. But he can’t help himself.

Here’s the thing, though. During the recent World Cup, I took my first, tentative steps into the world of football fandom. I’d never paid any attention to it before, not because I was uninterested in the game – 
it looked to be really rather good – but because I was scared off at an early age by the way everyone around me seemed to know all about it. They could recite lists of names and criticise the bearer of each name for their performance in a certain match decades ago.

Some of their talk wasn’t even about playing football but was, from what I could gather, teetering on the periphery of their circle, mostly about the various businessmen standing around in grey suits and terrible coats at the side of the pitch. A clash between two teams was, for them, as redolent with meaning and context and history as the Bayeux Tapestry is to David Starkey. Their minds were, like the man in the office (R Porter) given over entirely to the storage 
of facts pertaining to their chosen enthusiasm.

In front of such a panel of expertise, daring to raise my voice with an opinion during a discussion in a school playground, I would have felt like a mouse shouting into a hurricane. So dipping my 
toe into the shark-infested, thrashing waters of football fandom was a nerve-wracking moment, but I did it anyway.

As I was away on tour with the Top Gear Live show, matters were made rather more intense by the fact that I would be popping my football fan cherry in the company of m’esteemed colleagues on Top Gear. We watched a few of the early matches in hotel bars, and I slowly built up the courage to squeak my approval of a certain shot, and even to shake my head and tut quietly at what I considered to be an ill-considered pass or a ballsed-up shot on goal. Naturally, there came a moment when my humble squeaks and mutterings were picked up by the bigger, more seasoned fans 
around me, and, yes, I came in for some stick.

On a match we watched following an informal, garden kick-about of our own during which I had demonstrated exactly the ineptitude as a footballer that left me standing lonely and unpicked before every match I ever nearly played at school, it was pointed out by someone in our crowd that I was suddenly drawing on my own experience as a player to criticise those playing on the TV in front of us and that this was, perhaps, a bit ambitious. I threshed about a bit in the ensuing tsunami of abuse, panic rising with the waves around me. And then assistance started coming from a most unlikely direction.

A certain one of m’colleagues (it was Jeremy Clarkson) threw me a rope, pointing out good moves, agreeing with some of my opinions on tactics and play and pointing out where I might, perhaps, look closer and understand more.

Jeremy also came late to football fandom and perhaps had weathered a similar nerve-shredding baptism – though I can’t imagine it. My point is that we should sometimes stop and consider what effect our fact-packed observations concerning cars have on those who might, perhaps, carry a fledgling interest in the subject, but be scared of sharing it in case they do so in front of a Richard Porter who stammers and sputters with disbelief that they don’t know the name of the man who employed the designer of the wheels on the Lamborghini Miura – he will know that, by the way, definitely.

I for one, whilst possessing a mental filing cabinet a thousand drawers short 
of Porter’s towering edifice, shall wait a moment in future before sneering at someone’s misidentification of a car. I have learned through my baptism into football fandom that the tiny candle of initial interest is very easily blown out. And that might be a shame. Somewhere there is the person who will one day solve all our car problems, sorting hydrogen fuel cells or anti-gravity wheels, but right now they may have got no further than thinking, “Ooh, I quite like cars. Wonder what my mates think?”

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/richard-hammond-car-geeks-2014-9-22

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond on: Buying Habits

Consumer psychologist Richard identifies a new syndrome of wanting objects you already own…



I've no doubt you'll have read of m'colleagues' dread of buying trousers. They've both rattled on about it before, and you may have agreed with them that it is indeed an appalling prospect: the taking off, trying on, taking off and putting back on of trousers in a cupboard behind a curtain is an activity eclipsed in its degrading misery and awfulness only by torture or contacting your mobile telephone network. I would like, in my jollier, Brummier way, to consider another, altogether different aspect of the consumer experience; namely, those things you buy and enjoy so much you'd like to buy them again, only you've still got the first one you bought. Of course, it might be only me who suffers with this syndrome, but I'm pretty sure it'll turn out to be more widely spread than some might expect.

Of all the stuff cluttering up my home, garage, shed, car and pockets, I have two absolute favourite things. They are a motorcycle and a pair of headphones. The motorcycle is a BMW R1200RT, and the headphones are Sennheiser MM 450, Bluetooth noise-cancelling jobs. My only problem with them is that they're so good, I want to buy them again, but I can't cos I've already got them.

The rapid expansion of internet shopping will be slowing whatever rate of spread my newly identified consumer syndrome has achieved, if only because more and more of us find ourselves in possession of things we don't really like and wouldn't have bought if we'd looked at them in a shop, handled them and switched them on or sniffed them or tried them on.

Last Christmas in the Hammond household was, on the pressie front anyway, a bit of a washout. My wife had spent weeks flying over the choppy seas of the internet, swooping down like a seagull behind a trawler on anything she thought might appeal to our daughters. The problem turned out to be that most of what she bought was, indeed, the kind of thing they liked, but not the exact thing. My BMW and my headphones, by contrast, are perfect. I chose them for real, in a shop. I tried them on, turned them on and rode them or listened to each respectively before settling on what was, for me, the perfect thing.

The bike is my most faithful machine; we have travelled thousands of miles together, and I consider it a friend. The stereo, the satnav, cruise control, incredible luggage capacity and heated seat entertain and coddle me on every trip, and the indecently good handling still surprises the leather-swathed rider of many a litre sportsbike as I sail past listening to Chris Evans on the way to work. The headphones are equally suited to purpose: compact and light, they fold away into a small bag, they cancel out unwanted noise - not all of it, sadly, as I can still hear Jeremy and James moaning about trousers - they work with Bluetooth so I don't need a wire flapping about over my shoulder when I wear them while running, I can answer the phone through them, change track on my iPod with a button on the side of them, the battery lasts for weeks and while not advertised as waterproof, the hundreds of miles I have run through lashing rain while wearing them leads me to believe they may be so.

I cannot recommend either of them highly enough, and that's the problem. I envy anyone looking for headphones or a motorcycle, because they are able to go out and buy their own examples of these things and revel in their choice. I want to do the same. I want to buy them again. But I've already got them, and one of the finest qualities of each would be their apparently limitless ruggedness and longevity.

Before every run, I pull the headphones from their bag, secretly hoping that they've finally (and deservedly, given the abuse they have endured) packed up, gifting me an excuse to go and buy them all over again. But they won't die. The plastic around the earpieces is shredding a bit and looks worn, but that just enhances their appearance to me and cements their status as long-term friends. The buggers are going to see me out.

Likewise the bike: it's tougher than the ship it came over from Germany on. It's now been superseded by a new model. I went and rode one at my local dealer and, with a heavy heart, confessed that I preferred my older model - a feeling further strengthened with the announcement by BMW of a recall of the new one due to a problem with the rear suspension. No such issues with mine: it refuses to give up.

I have, however, found a sort of solution, with the bike at least. This week, I crashed it. To be accurate and fair, I was crashed into. A driver executing a hasty U-turn on a major London road failed to check their mirror and spot the huge motorcycle filling their rear window and towering above their hatchback like an oil tanker sneaking up on a punt, and they reversed into me and my bike, knocking us over and making a bit of a scene all round.

The thing is, galling though it might be to struggle out from under a couple of tonnes of capsized BMW and look down at your valued friend and realise it is in need of urgent medical care, it has given me the opportunity at least to repair, if not replace, the old thing and re-engage with it financially, showing my appreciation for what a tremendous machine it is. And if that isn't looking on the bright side of something, I'd like you to show me what is.


www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/richard-hammond-top-gear-magazine-column-2014-10-24

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond: Analogue vs Digital

Mrs H has just returned from a festival. It sounded awful, but she seemed to have had a great time. When the car returning her home rolled up at the front door, she stepped from the delirious, boozy fug within bearing a smile broad enough, almost, to outshine the wrinkles and weariness accumulated over a weekend spent sleeping in a tent, peeing in a bucket and standing in a field looking at a once-great musician hopping about on a remote stage like a spider on a tea tray.

The festival seemed to have consisted, from what I could gather during the ensuing debrief at the kitchen table, exclusively of those artists I disliked when new, and feel no more inclined to enjoy now the decades passed since the height of their powers have rendered them less than field-fresh.

It was all about the Eighties, a decade which was, as far as my memories are concerned, pretty awful. I didn't like the music, the clothes, the hair or the cheap lager. But there are many people who disagree. The fields, camping grounds, temporary bars and unspeakable lavatories were, I was told, full of joyous revellers revelling joyously. And not all of them were 40-somethings defying the harsh evidence of straining waistbands and bursting Lycra seams to enjoy a time-travel trip back to the decade of their youth. There were many, I was told, from far later decades, just happy to go to a festival and join in, to lose themselves in the crowds and soak up the live music. I struggled to see how this was possible, because to anyone under the age of 45, the music must have sounded like a hurdy-gurdy ensemble or an organ with a handle and a monkey on top.

But in an age when tomorrow's world leaders and champions of commerce are updating their digital profiles to share their actions, hopes and thoughts with people they will never meet, and downloading their favourite TV shows to watch later on their watches, the earthy, visceral, analogue thrills of a live event are calling with a fresh and commanding voice.

Bands make their money now from live shows rather than selling 45rpm singles of their latest hit in Woolworths. The O2 is, as far as I can tell, permanently full of pre-teen groupies hopping about in front of their musical idols while their parents look on and wonder what happened to cassettes.

The growing array of TV talent shows intent on encouraging us to dial in and pay to vote for the next singing, dancing, juggling, cooking, yodelling hero, concentrate not on how good-looking the contestants are, but on how good they actually are at the thing they want to do. The singers can sing, the dancers can dance and, well, I've never watched, but I'm sure the rest of them are also really good at the stuff they want to strut on the global stage.

There are even competitions for gamers who can transfer their driving skills from the digital world to the analogue one and launch a career as a real racing driver.

All of which make the actions of a young van driver I passed recently inexplicable, but those of perhaps a generation stuck in the middle. He was coming the other way in his van, I was in a Land Rover - an old but rather dignified one. I gave way to allow him to pass a car parked on his side of the road, even though it was clearly my right of way. He was a youngish bloke, perhaps mid-20s, driving his van, doing his job, out there in the world earning money to spend on digital downloads, driving games and data minutes. As he passed, I raised a cheery hand from the battered wheel of the Landie and smiled.

He blanked me. Never even looked across. Failed to engage in any way with the sole other human being on a quiet stretch of road on a cheery Wednesday morning. Distracted maybe, thinking of new tactics for Forza or reflecting on the weekend's performances on Britain's Got the Next Supermodel Singer Danceathon, but nevertheless, an oddly out-of-place response. Because I firmly believe that we are, as a species, not just clinging onto the essential human interactions that make us special, but are swinging back towards them with a vigour and urgency typical of the creature that came to dominate the world.

My daughters can download instantly any track they want, can search the net to laugh at videos of monkeys riding piglets, but that's all just background babble, inconsequential nothings. When we gave them mobile phones, we thought they'd be up all night marvelling at this miracle that means they can talk to people on the other side of the planet without a wire, or navigate a strange city without carrying a map. But this stuff is just the world they live in, their birthright. What they really want to do is get together, watch bands, have fun and arse about with their mates, and then share it with other young people all over the world. They're not going to become introverted and unfriendly, staring at their screens and playing with imaginary friends, they're going to look up and open up.

And that starts with waving at polite car drivers coming the other bloody way. The kid in the van was, perhaps, from a generation in between, one that came after the digital revolution had started, but before human nature had turned it into something it could really work with. He'll learn; he'll have to. Christ, I sound like ‘Thought for the Day'.

This column was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Top Gear magazine


www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/richard-hammond-column-top-gear-magazine-2014-11-24

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond on: Boating

11 December 2014

Remove Top Gear presenter from fast car on safe dry land. Place in smallish boat in dangerous waters. Stand back...

While we're good at pretty much everything on Top Gear, even we will concede that things don't generally go well for us on the water. We cope admirably with the most barren deserts, dense rainforests, empty plains and stark glaciers, but we do rather fall apart when confronted with any challenge involving boats or variations thereof. Our attempts at designing amphibious vehicles were always, until the arrival of the brilliant Hovervan, catastrophic.

It's not so much the design or engineering that stumps us - indeed, these stages have always been executed with imagination and brilliance - it's the use of them where things go a bit wonky. And even in the rare case of the successful Hovervan, it worked, yes, but Jeremy drove it straight into a tree. And then a boat. And then a man in a rowing boat. And then a bridge and another boat and a lock wall and a weir.

And it was the same with our amphibious cars: James's sailing Herald worked but he sailed it into some weeds and sat there being useless while the boat continued to float and function perfectly. Jeremy's first attempt at an amphibious Toyota pickup worked perfectly, and indeed he would have won that challenge, only he overdid it on the final turn and rolled it. My amphibious camper van just didn't work, but that was an exception to the rule.

The thing is, there's something daunting about being on the water that causes us to fall apart. It might be connected with the fact that the world of water travel is entirely chaotic. Any numpty with a big balance can stroll into the boat shop and walk out twirling the keys to a boat as powerful as a jet airliner. There are licences, sort of, but these are mostly to do with insurance companies being a bit interested in the skills of Johnny Punter hiring a half-million-quid boat for which they are liable if Johnny Punter stuffs it into the harbour wall. And it was for this reason that me and six other stout Herefordian chaps had to spend five days on what amounted to a floating stag trip on the Solent earning our International Certificate of Competency before we could be handed the keys to the sailing boats we had hired to take our families on holiday on the coast of Croatia.

Yes, the holiday went brilliantly, thank you. We travelled as a flotilla of seven boats containing 15 adults and approximately 2,000 children, and had a jolly good time. And I got yet another insight into the chaotic nature of boating. There are no sodding lines down the road, for one thing. We set off, and people sort of vaguely keep to one side or the other as you leave a harbour. There are rules about things like this, but no one knows them or they choose to ignore them. There are rules too about overtaking - not that we did much, propelled as we were by bedsheets on sticks. But again, no one knows these rules or they choose to ignore them.

In any given area of sea, there might, on occasions, be 20 or 30 boats bobbing about with their bedsheets out, along with various pleasure cruisers, a couple of gin palaces skulking silkily about, a 300-million-tonne ferry, a handful of sombre, workmanlike fishing boats, a drunk in a rowing boat and a dick on a windsurfing thing. There are literally dozens of rules about manoeuvring in such a situation; boats should pass on this side or that; the leeward boat has right of way over another, or that might be windward; certain channels are reserved for certain craft, and every bugger has to give way to a boat moving under sail unless it's sneakily got its engine on as well and is displaying a special flag thing to indicate the fact - which he won't be because he wants everyone to think he's zizzing about only thanks to the mystical power of Mother Nature's wind.

But none of it seems to apply. Everyone just sort of clatters about and tries, or hopes, not to bump into anyone else. Having driven cars in cities all over the world, it was a terrifying revelation to watch as the chaos churned around our little boat. I didn't watch it all, because I had my eyes shut for a lot of the time, relying on the pitch of my daughters' screams to gauge the trajectory and proximity of other craft.

Granted, there are those out there possessed of immense skill in the business of actually manoeuvring the boat. After one particularly lengthy mooring procedure, we retired, sweaty and exhausted with stress to the deck with a gin and tonic to watch as a bloke arrived in a boat twice the size of ours and simply hammered up to the dock in full reverse, stopped about an inch off the pontoon, threw a rope over the back and tied it up. Took him about 20 seconds; I've seen more fuss made about parking a Toyota Yaris outside Morrisons.

But the following morning, this guru of the seas set out into exactly the same chaos as us and simply battered about in vaguely the direction he wanted to go, giving way to no one and adding to the infernal floating bedlam that blighted my every waking hour and haunted the sleeping ones for two weeks.

In short, this is a cry for the nautical world to sort its act out. It is indeed great fun messing about on the water, but the very real and looming possibility of being mashed to a pulp by an oil tanker or cut to ribbons by a multimillion-pound propeller behind a drunken stockbroker impressing his mistress does rather take the shine off it. Look to the roads, chaps, see how we do it and learn. Over to you.

www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/hammond-on-boating-2014-12-11

Mindy's take on the trip:
Mindy Hammond is all at sea
jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/296543/thread
www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/mindy-hammond/509613/Mindy-Hammond-on-sailing-holiday

[RedMoon11]

Richard Hammond on: The School Run

Jan 08, 2015

Due to an unscheduled return from filming, Richard's joined the morning back-road club and has been doing the school run

Of the many things for which I regularly have the mickey taken out of me on TopGear, the Hammond family's yoghurt-commercial lifestyle stands out as a particularly well-placed, accurate stab.

Despite the world's conviction to the contrary, I have never actually had my teeth whitened or dyed my hair, but my family and I do live, it's true, in a comforting blur of rural happiness, riding ponies, walking dogs and feeding ducks. All of which is smashing: rosy cheeks, chunky woollen wear, Sunday lunches, bracing country air and all that. But I do sometimes envy those families who've got it all organised and sorted with their urban lifestyle.

I feel a twinge of jealousy watching TV adverts where you see the dad kiss his family goodbye and set off to commute a mile to work, while the kids trot down the road to school with their shiny backpacks full of sandwiches and the mum sets off in a small sports car to her office a mile away. The Hammond crew's school run is 50 miles there and back, and often has to be done three times a day, to accommodate whatever after-school hockey match, theatre performance or birthday party must be attended. And the closest thing I have to an office is a shared corner of the TG production office at the BBC, meaning my ‘commute' is a round trip of 250 miles.

I have, of late, had more opportunities than usual to spare Mrs Hammond and do the school run myself, following our recent, unscheduled return from Argentina - of which we shall speak no more, other than to say it was a coincidence. It just was. And even if it wasn't - which it was - what were they thinking, throwing rocks at 20-year-old researchers and camera assistants, thousands of miles from home in the middle of the night?

Anyway, it seems that there are some who refuse to believe that we didn't decode the numberplate's hidden message, indeed that we chose the plate, the car and planned the entire film on the basis of what would have been, anyway, a pretty weak gag. The fact is, we didn't look at the numberplate other than to acknowledge that it had one when we filled in forms to buy it and ship it. I have never looked for messages in a numberplate of any car I've bought.

A friend turned up at the school gates, very proud of his new Discovery, and particularly so of its numberplate which, he claimed, spelled out - with a combination of Bs, zeros and eights - ‘boob'. I hadn't spotted it until he pointed it out but did then enjoy laughing at it. He laughed a lot louder when I rolled up in our new family car, also a Discovery, the numberplate of which, he pointed out, spelled, thanks to a combination of ‘V', ‘A' and ‘G' another word possibly pertaining to bits of a lady but of an altogether less appropriate nature at the school gates. I had never noticed this, nobody since has noticed and, anyway, it's only my numberplate and I don't care what it spells out, it's just there to identify my car. And, if someone does notice, I don't expect to be stoned at the gates.

Anyway, the aforementioned numberplate had forced an early return for me from the southern hemisphere, and I was glad to take up duties as the school run taxi driver.

On Day Two, it was impossible to miss the fact that the 25 miles of winding country roads to school were unusually clogged. There's always traffic - it's a busy route - but this was different. The local motorway was, it turned out, closed due to having been turned into a skidpan by a lorry crashing and emptying its load of oil on it.

I knew something had happened before I saw the diversion signs because, I suddenly realised, I didn't recognise the cars and trucks around me. Which meant that normally I did. The red Golf usually parked at the top of a blind crest, the psychopathic sheep farmer in the Defender who absolutely will have a big one on a blind bend one day, even the little old lady whom I am convinced waits along the road in her Ford Focus for me to leave my gates before setting off ahead of me to keep my speed down to 12mph... all of these people became familiar characters in a soap opera that I had got to join in every morning.

The plot's a bit thin, the action can be slow, but the scenery's great and I really enjoy it. Injecting all these new characters had ruined it for me. I resented the dismal twerp in a green Toyota Corolla who insisted on cruising at a steady 35 through the 50mph limits and then accelerating to a steady 45 for the 30mph stretches.

They were by no means as dangerous as the young lunatic in his black Corsa whom I dread encountering every morning on the hill past the pub by the converted chapel, but he's a familiar character now, he's part of our play, part of our club.

They'll fix the M50 one day soon, and all these unwelcome invaders will leave our road and we can get back to our normal morning and evening rituals and perhaps take a fresh look at the unique little club to which, it turns out, we all belong.

Strangely enough, when you have to spend some time away from home, it's the small, inconsequential things you miss, like the characters in your daily school run.


www.topgear.com/uk/richard-hammond/hammond-on-schoolrun-2015-08-01

[RedMoon11]

May 2015

[RedMoon11]

The Brake Is On The Right
Top Gear Magazine: June 2015


James has his say - jamesmayboard.proboards.com/post/298319/thread
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