Worst astronauts in the world. 10,9,8... 'Forgot me helmet'...7,6,5....'I need a pee'...4,3,2...'where's James?'

"I can't remember if I took my Malaria tablet this morning. If I were a girl I'd be pregnant A LOT"

It is made very, very carefully and is crafted to be the way it is - there's no way it's going to go. They delayed it because I was poorly and there are three of us on it - it's about the three of us.

You worked that out? WOW! So you must actually have done everything there is to do in the whole world, to get to the bottom of the list of everything a human being can do. What's it like at the top of Everest?--Richard Hammond after James May reveals he worked out the total number of revolutions his 25 year old Porches engine had done

    Oh! it squeaks!-- to Jeremy who's lost his voice.

    Correct! Well done sir! Stand up to him, he's a big oaf just keep going.

It's kind of like a Stephen Hawking Facebook
Richard Hammond of the social networking feature of the Toyota iWheel

    Unless I have been sorely misinformed, supermodels are powerless to resist a man with illuminated doorsills.

    The last time I saw plastic like this it contained Tic-Tacs

Now, this is really quite simple ,ok? Understeer works like this: you drive down the road , turn the wheel, but the car goes straight on, crashes into a tree and you die. OVERsteer works like this: you drive down the same bit of road, turn the wheel, but the back of the car comes round like this, and you go off the road, crash into a tree and you die. Now, oversteer is best, because you don't see the tree that kills you.

     Oh, dear! I fear Jeremy may be heading this way with an opinion!

 I am not moonlighting as the editor of a gay magazine!

Now, earlier the three of us have use our extensive knowledge of lorrying to buy HGVs and it wasn't going well. Especially for Jeremy, who ended up with a gear lever in his bottom and his truck on fire.

If I had known we were going to cross the English Channel I'd have got a bigger anchor

I can be moody. And I snore. And I leave my dirty socks on the floor. And sometimes I wake up on a park bench, naked, with hair growing on my palms, a feeling of guilt and a vague memory of running by moonlight. Actually, I lied. That's just my imagination. Which, coincidentally, is probably my most unappealing characteristic.

"We have some fabulous supercars driving around on the stage and making a noise, but the big annoying bloke, the one with the bad hair facing the wrong way and the little fella being groomed as the spiritual successor to Stuart Hall don't go anywhere near these. We only drive rubbish. "

Can you tell us something embarrassing about Clarkson?
He can't throw. You know how if you throw with your wrong hand it feels all limp? Well, he throws like that all the time. I tell him he throws like a girl but he won't believe me. It's embarrassing.

Finally, your nickname is Captain Slow and Richard's is Hamster. What's Clarkson's?
Surprisingly he doesn't have one. He's got a really long body, a long, ugly face and Brillo pad hair but "long-body, long-face, Brillo-pad-hair man" isn't very catchy, is it.
-Interview In Nuts Magazine

Great news! It's news to warm the hearts of nations! Jeremy Clarkson has lost his voice!

   The acceleration is so brutal! I think my eyes have moved around the side of my head like a pigeon.
driving the Zonda F

What's the Norwegian for 'Oh, cock'?

 It’s an ingenious solution to a problem that never should have existed in the first place.”

“thats the biggest load of limp wristed twaddle i’ve heard in all my 5 weeks of working on top gear.”

"Oh, I'm so impractical. I can't even wire a plug", because they think that makes them sound more intellectual, I think, "No, that means you're thick, because the instructions are on the plug and if you can't do that, you are a moron. Then people say, "I'm very technically minded, but I don't know anything about writing and I can't do punctuation." I think, "No, you're just thick, because those things are quite simple." I'm sure people with properly developed brains can do a bit of both.'

'I think if you can't do stuff as a bloke, then you're only here to keep sperm warm until it's needed - and not even that any more, because now they can make it artificially, apparently. No, I believe you can do anything in a manly way.'

My Top Gear colleagues think it terribly funny that I once proclaimed that I loved my cat, Fusker, above all else; more, even, than my old Bentley. But, so help me, I do. Before anyone writes in with some cod psychology and any nonsense about me projecting on to a dumb animal, I am well aware that Fusker does not love me. He loves cat food.

The flow of adoration runs in one direction; I spend hours talking to him, even though the only word he might possibly understand is "Fusker", and in return not one sound of any consequence has ever emanated from his witless furry face. He has never passed me a spanner or written any of this column, except for a bit that went fasdfij ffeug djdvbv9821.

'He's fit and he's a very simple mechanism. It would be like trying to break a tin-opener. You can't really break a tin-opener. I suspect Hammond was a handy scrapper at school. Jeremy's the least tough, of course. He's got the size, but it doesn't count for much. HMS Hood was a very big warship but it still blew up with one direct hit.'--On Hammond's crash

The discussion I have with Jeremy is that one day we'll have a pub. I'm quite interested in beer, Jeremy likes wine, we both like eating, so when we stop doing the show we're going to have a Top Gear Pub. Not as a branding exercise where you turn up occasionally like Gordon Ramsay - this would actually be us serving you, all the time: beer, wine, pies, fish-finger sandwiches. We'd live upstairs. But I'm 46, Jezza's a few years older than me, so we'd have to do it fairly soon I think.

"Richard is winning his fight...."

Bashing rainforest insects over the head with a shoe is pointless. It just makes them sad.

“Women can fly airliners and they could fly fast fighter jets too, if they didn’t have wombs, which tend to come off in high ‘G’ turns – I’m not making that up"

Black T-shirts are worn by roadies so that they cannot be seen as they move about the stage, at concerts, preparing the next guitar and sorting out the drummer who’s taken so much cocaine he’s fallen off his seat. This is fine. But there is another group of people who wear black T-shirts. They are known as “German paedophiles”, and that’s not fine at all. Oh, and Simon Cowell, come to think of it.

Then you have the pink T-shirt, worn predominantly to say you are so confident about your sexuality that you can get away with anything. Unfortunately, the problem with wearing a pink T-shirt is that I’m afraid you don’t look confident at all. You look like a cruising homosexual. Which is fine if you are. But annoying if you are just shopping.

I have another <tshirt> that says, “I love animals. They’re delicious”. Though I have to be careful about that one because often it doesn’t make the world a lovelier place. It makes thin-lipped women launch into a tirade about meat and animals, and after a while, inevitably, why the penis is fundamentally evil.

“a dog is not just for Christmas. There should be some left over for Boxing Day”.

  I went to a dinner party and there was this young girl who couldn't believe James May was still single

    This car is vicious in an amusing way… like a shark in a funny hat.
on the Zonda F roadster

    The thing is, it's a gearbox, okay? It has one job to do! One job! Pull the lever… 'Am I a pencil? Am I a cauliflower? Am I a nuclear power sta– I'm a gearbox! Oh, heavens, I'm gonna swap some cogs around!'

    Were you watching that drag race? Did you see what the physics lesson did to your pantomime dame? It annihilated it.
 on the drag race between the Pagani Zonda F Roadster and the Bugatti Veyron

[In the Caterham race]
The Stig was now on the M40 and had the hammer down. I, too, had put my hammer down, and picked up a spanner! And something was bound to go wrong.

        If Hammond drives into May's car, Bruce Willis will come in a State Department gunship and we shall all be killed.

    Right, what we have here is a snooker table or as Richard Hammond calls it as he arrived this morning, "Crikey, a football pitch!"

They're made in America, of course, so that fat Yanks can go to the fridge without expending any energy.
while driving a Segway

    It's, um, a mobile phone holder, or as Richard Hammond calls it, a seat!

 It's like a lion in orange dungarees. Kind of fierce, but ridiculous all at the same time.
on the Pagani Zonda.

    In some parts of America they've actually started mating with vegetables.
Cletus Clarkson on Top Gear's big American Road Trip

    Look. A petrol station, the natural home territory of the Ford GT. And there it is, at the watering hole, drinking its fill. For the 47th time today.
on his Ford GT.

    I think Koenigsegg is Swedish for: Oh no, my head has just exploded!
on the Koenigsegg CCX.

     If you have any thoughts or opinions on what you've seen in the last ten weeks, do please keep them to yourselves.
summing up the end of a series.

There are shantytowns in South Africa that are built better than Renaults!
on the Renault Modus.

    Biathletes need to eat 6.000 calories a day: six thousand! That's the equivalent of 2 pounds of butter, 70 slices of bread, 112 eggs, 86 tabs of yogurts, 28 potatoes, 117 biscuits and 21 TWIX bars. On that basis, I could be an Olympic biathlete!
on the Car Biathlon.

“Some cars have tuned exhausts, so the noise they make is as fake as a hookers smile”

[about Ferrari Enzo] I rang up Jay Kay, who's got one, and said, "You know, can we borrow yours?" and he said, "Yeah, if I can borrow your daughter, because it amounts to the same thing."

[about TVR Tuscan 2] You see, my wife loves this car. She loves the noise and the vibrations and the sense of danger and the way that when you over-rev it, the whole dash lights up like a baboon's backside. Richard Hammond on the other hand, he pretty much hates it. He says its too difficult and too complicated and that all the stitching in here looks like the kind of stitching you find when someone's tried to mend their own shoes.

 [peering into the engine bay on the Lotus Exige] To get an idea of just how spartan this thing is, you just have to look through the rear window. Back there you've got chicken wire, bakofoil and tupperware. It's kind of like peering into one of your grannies' old kitchen cabinets.

 Racing cars which have been converted for road use never really work. It's like making a hard core adult film, and then editing it so that it can be shown in British hotels. You'd just end up with a sort of half hour close up of some bloke's sweaty face.

 We start tonight with the highlight of my childhood. It's the Ladybird Book of Motorcars from 1963, and as you would imagine it's full of rubbish really. Just endless boring grey shapes, until you get to page 40, where you find the Maserati 3500 GT. Now this for me, when I was little, was like kind of Jordan and Cameron Diaz. In a bath together. With a Lightning jet fighter. And lots of jelly.

 There is a lot to not like about the BMW. The grotesque carbon-fibre dashboard, the enormous steering wheel and the fact that this one is the colour of a vet's forearm.

 [When driving the McLaren Mercedes SLR through a tunnel] When they debate as to what the sound of the SLR engine was akin to, the British engineers from McLaren said it sounded like a Spitfire. But the German engineers from Mercedes said "Nein! Nein! Sounds like a Messerschmitt!" They were both wrong. It sounds like the God of Thunder, gargling with nails.

This turning right on a red light is America's only contribution to western civilization.

"You see, the thing about putting a nice big engine like this on is for one big reason: weight, alot of weight. this big thing weighs nearly 600 pounds, which is the same as putting a whole american on the back" -

you have just been lapped by captain slow in a princess, full of water

To Hammond "I've just had another thought, & thats how much you look like the cat in Shrek 2"

Looking at David Tennant:
You're like a more handsome version of Hammond.

regarding the TATA:  "it has less toys than an ethiopian christmas"

“The air conditioning in Lamborghinis used to be an asthmatic sitting in the dashboard blowing at you through a straw.”

Speed has never killed anyone. Suddenly becoming stationary, that's what gets you, that's the killer.

[on the Prodrive P2]
You also get a funny little noise from the waste gate when you take your foot off the accelerator... [he slows down and we hear the noise] It sounds like squirrels are being pushed into the engine... that's what this is, it's a squirrel mincer.

You look like a gay cowboy - on Hammond wearing a cowboy hat and boots on the American road trip

Driving the Audi R8 is like smearing honey into Kiera Knightly

    I’m sorry, but having an Aston Martin DB9 on the drive and not driving it is a bit like having Keira Knightley in your bed and sleeping on the couch.

“I mean look at Kiera Knightly – she’s just an ironing board with a face, and she works.”

Hobbies are for people who were caught masturbating by their mums. 

Jeremy: If my dicky wicky catches fire, I'm putting it out in you [pointing at James]
Shane: I'd pay to see that...
Jeremy: All these people already have
(Top Gear Live in Australia)

[on the Aston Martin V8 Vantage]
Clarkson: I would rather be in this, than in Keira Knightley.
May: And now the news: and this just in from Keira Knightley; She says she's disappointed but she understands.

Clarkson: What the hell accent is that?
    Studio guest: I'm American
    Clarkson: You can't be, you're nowhere near fat enough!

Clarkson: I admit there are a few things I need to address…
May: What? Like the laws of physics?
    Clarkson: I will get around them…

Terry Wogan (guest): Do you swerve to avoid rabbits?
Clarkson: Never. Do you?
Wogan: No.
Clarkson: Foxes?
Wogan: No!
Clarkson: No?
[Silence]
Wogan: … Children?
Clarkson: I do, I do… Children, yeah. I have swerved to avoid children.
Wogan: You see, you see, you're too soft for this game.

May: you know who's bought one, don't you?
Clarkson: Who, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder?
May: Him (Points to hammond)
Hammond: It's the last of the British supercars
May: I'm with Hammond
Clarkson: I'm sorry everyone for the blindness here
Hammond: When I heard you say 'i'm with hammond' i thought we were goin' out

Hammond: How could you not like the GT2, you great fat balding useless hopeless bandy-legged bubble-haired pointless talentless gutless cowardly witless lump of suede-shoe-wearing daft-jean-wearing idiocy?
    Clarkson I knew you were gonna say that…
    Hammond What? All of it?

Hammond: [Talking about the Ford GT's poor fuel economy and the fact that Jeremy is getting one] And actually, 17 and a half gallon tank. 4... 4 miles to the gallon, how far does that mean you will be able to go in your car before you run out of petrol?
Clarkson: 75 miles.
Hammond: 75 miles?
Clarkson: Yeah.
 Hammond: Well, how far then do you live, for instance, from the Top Gear office?
Clarkson:76 miles.

Clarkson:[Inside Hammond's CamperBoat] This is actually quite cosy
Hammond: Oh yeah, has all the comforts of a houseboat
Clarkson: [pair start reading magazines] Did you see the titles of these?
Hammond: No... well I went for those that have a houseboat feel to them.
Clarkson: [Shows Hammond the title of the mag he picked up "Gay Times"] So why this then?

During the Cool Wall, talking about the Koenigsegg CCX.]
Clarkson: If you go though the Pearly Gates, backwards, in a fireball, that's a cool way to die!
Hammond:  I love that vision of just blasting through the gates, backwards, in a flaming Swedish supercar! Yes! I'm here! Where are the women?
 
Jeremy has often been described as 'the most influential man in motoring journalism', mainly by himself. Estimates suggest that he is slightly over nine feet tall, owns 14,000 pairs of jeans and has destroyed almost 4.2 million tyres in his lifetime. He is best known for possessing a right foot apparently consisting of some sort of lead-based substance, for creating some of the most tortured similes ever committed to television, and for leaving the world's longest pauses between two parts... of the same sentence. He has never taken public transport.

Story Quotes

James May on why he should not be getting involved with Jeremy and Richard:
"Three-way relationships are complicated enough among people who actually get things right! I don't even know how a relationship ends up on fire at the bottom of the lake, but I'm sure if anyone could manage it, Jeremy could. This could blow up really horribly."

Jeremy’s escape plan would almost certainly involve setting the entirety of Wales on fire. And then someone would complain to the BBC about it.
--Amy Wolf, The Tower
 
 

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