Just thought with top gear being put back on the air within a months time I would throw up an article I found on James May. Who thought being fired three times could land someone such a good job?
One thing I know I am desperate to find out is whether or not they tested the veyron on their track. And if they didn't, why the hell would they not!?!


The Sunday Times November 26, 2006


On the move: James May
Alison Jane Reid

James May was born in 1963 in Bristol. He graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in music and worked for a number of years as a sub-editor for trade magazines before joining Top Gear as a presenter. A new series is due to start at the end of January and he can currently be seen on Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure on Wednesdays at 8.30pm on BBC2. He lives in Hammersmith, west London, with his cat Fusker





James May, aka Top Gear’s “Captain Slow”, is sporting an impressive wrist support, the result of an accident while performing at the MPH show last month. He sees me looking at it and anticipates my first question.
“No, this is not the curse of Top Gear. It had nothing to do with the show,” he says, referring to the more serious accident involving his co-presenter Richard Hammond, who crashed at 300mph in September while filming for the BBC series. “I fell out of a supermarket trolley.”

According to May, the stunt, which involved Jeremy Clarkson pushing him in a modified trolley using a V8 Ford Mustang, was all going well until he lost his concentration and the trolley toppled over. “I rather stupidly put my arm out to push it back up and sprained my wrist. The doctor told me it was just a sprain and to stop being such a wimp. I’m claiming it’s Jeremy’s fault, of course.”



The news is equally good for Hammond, who is making a speedy recovery: “I have to be slightly careful of what I say about the accident, because I don’t think there has been a formal conclusion as to the cause yet. But I can tell you that Hammond is actually better, he has been in the office and he has scheduled in filming for January (when the new Top Gear series is due to start). I am going out for a curry with him next week I think, so no permanent long-lasting effects.”

This pleases May for typically idiosyncratic reasons. “I am actually getting rather bored of having to be nice about him all the time. I can go back to just treating him like a proper friend and calling him an arsehole.”

The humour belies the fact that May and the rest of the Top Gear team were badly shaken by Hammond’s accident, which saw him airlifted to hospital. “It was a very dramatic event and it was rather sobering to see someone doing something that he loved come to grief like that. I think it pulled people up a bit short.”

Was he surprised by the level of public interest and support after the crash? “I was in some ways, yes. But Top Gear is a very popular programme. You could say that it is a refreshing thumb on the nose to ninnyish, wet-nurse, not-eating-any-fat, cycling everywhere and being a bit wholemeal. We don’t do that, so we’re sort of ambassadors for normality.”

May is proud of his role on the show as the voice of reason: the one who, among all the rubber-burning excitement, practises “Christian motoring” (that’s letting people out at junctions and generally being pleasant on the road). He claims there is an element of self-denial behind his character. “I’ve always had a slight leaning towards the monastic even when I wasn’t doing telly: it reminds me to be grateful for small mercies.

“The feature I’ve always wanted to do is to take a demonically exciting and luxurious car — let’s say the Ferrari F430, a real guilty pleasure — and then go on a very long drive by myself, going through a variety of roads and scenery. But at the end of it there is a monastery, and as penance I have to stay there for a week.”

In real life May’s cars are anything but demonic: a 27-year-old Bentley, two Porsches, an XJS convertible (which features in Oz and James’s Big Wine Adventure, his latest television venture) and a Fiat Panda. “I like the sensations of simple little cars,” he says. “I still think in many ways that an original Mini is the most exciting car to drive. You are close to everything in a Mini — the crankshaft, the windscreen — death!” Owning five cars isn’t greed, merely the manifestation of his love of motors that has driven his career. “Some motoring journalists don’t actually own a car, which I find preposterous,” he says. “I’ve pretty much always owned a car of some sort. A Triumph Vitesse, a Citroën Visa, a Rover — even when I’ve been hard up.”

And he has certainly had his impecunious times. He was fired from a job with Autocar magazine in the early 1990s. “I was the production editor for a thing called the Road Test Yearbook. I started each road test with a big red capital letter and re-edited them so the first letters spelt a message going through 101 road tests saying something along the lines of, ‘You should try making the bloody thing up it’s a right pain in the arse’, which I thought was fabulously funny.”

But the management didn’t, and he was fired after some readers spotted the hidden message and wrote in thinking they had won a prize. “I had to walk home from Teddington to Chiswick,” May recalls. “Autocar was at least the third job I was fired from. I used to get fired a lot in the old days and now I’m always braced and ready for it.”

On his CD changer


AC/DC, Let There Be Rock, King Crimson Lizard, Andreas Scholl Bach cantatas for counter-tenor, Olivier Messiaen Visions de l’Amen, played by pianists Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch