Richard Mark Hammond (born 19 December 1969) is an English journalist, television presenter, mechanic, and writer. He is best known for co-hosting the BBC Two motoring programme Top Gear from 2002 until 2015 with Jeremy Clarkson and James May. Since 2016, the trio have presented Amazon Studios' The Grand Tour.
Hammond has also notably presented entertainment documentary series Brainiac: Science Abuse (2003–2008), the game show Total Wipeout (2009–2012) and nature documentary series Planet Earth Live (2012). In 2016, again with Clarkson and May, Hammond launched the automotive social media website DriveTribe, where he regularly provides content on his tribe "Hammond's Fob Jockeys".
Early life
Hammond was born the oldest of three boys on 19 December 1969 in Solihull, England, and is the grandson of workers in the Birmingham car industry. In the mid-1980s Hammond moved with his family (mother Eileen (née Dunsby), father Alan, and younger brothers Andrew, writer of the 'Crypt' series, and Nicholas to the North Yorkshire cathedral city of Ripon located 10 miles south of the market town of Bedale, and 8 miles south of the historic village of Thornton Watlass where his father ran a probate business in the market square. He attended Blossomfield Infant School in Solihull's Sharmans Cross district from the age of 3–7. Originally a pupil of Solihull School, a fee-paying boys' independent school, he moved to Ripon Grammar School, and from 1986 to 1988 attended Harrogate College of Art and Technology. According to an episode of Top Gear (Season 16, Episode 5), Richard's first job was shovelling grit into a water filtration plant.
Career
After graduation, Hammond worked for several BBC radio stations, including Radio Cleveland, Radio York, Radio Cumbria, Radio Leeds and Radio Newcastle.
Presenting the afternoon programme at Radio Lancashire, his regular guests included motoring journalist Zog Zieglar, who would review a car of the week by being interviewed by Hammond over the phone. The two became good friends, and it was Zieglar who encouraged Hammond to enter into motoring reviews on television. After starting out on satellite TV, he auditioned for Top Gear.
Top Gear
Hammond became a presenter on Top Gear in 2002, when the show began in its revamped format. He is sometimes referred to as "The Hamster" by fans and his co-presenters due to his name and relatively small stature compared to May and Clarkson. His nickname was further reinforced when on three occasions in series 7, he ate cardboard, mimicking hamster-like behaviour.
Following a high-speed dragster crash while filming in September 2006 near York, Hammond returned in the first episode of series 9 (broadcast on 28 January 2007) to a hero's welcome, complete with dancing girls, aeroplane-style stairs and fireworks. The show also contained images of the crash, which had made international headlines, with Hammond talking through the events of the day after which the audience broke into spontaneous applause. Hammond then requested that the crash never be mentioned on the show again, though all three Top Gear presenters have since referred to it in jokes during the news segment of the programme. He told his colleagues, "The only difference between me now and before the crash is that I like celery now and I didn't before".
Following the BBC's decision not to renew Clarkson's contract with the show on 25 March 2015, Hammond's contract expired on 31 March. In April, he ruled out the possibility of continuing to present Top Gear, commenting via Twitter that "amidst all this talk of us 'quitting' or not: there's nothing for me to 'quit' not about to quit my mates anyway". On 12 June 2015, the BBC confirmed that Top Gear would return with a 75-minute special, combining two unseen challenges featuring all three presenters from series 22, with studio links from Hammond and May. It aired in the UK on BBC Two on 28 June at 8 p.m, and in the United States on BBC America on 13 July at 9 p.m.
Vampire dragster crash
During filming of a Top Gear segment at the former RAF Elvington airbase near York on 20 September 2006, Hammond was injured in the crash of the jet-powered car he was piloting. He was travelling at at the time of the crash.
His vehicle, a dragster called Vampire, was theoretically capable of travelling at speeds of up to . The vehicle was the same car that in 2000, piloted by Colin Fallows, set the British land speed record at . The Vampire was powered by a single Bristol-Siddeley Orpheus afterburning turbojet engine producing of thrust.