Paddy McGuinness struggled to find first gear, let alone Top Gear, when he raced Formula One stars in the new series of the show.
Presenters Paddy, Freddie Flintoff and Chris Harris, filming during the British GP at Silverstone, took on F1’s Sebastian Vettel, Lando Norris and Antonio Giovinazzi.
But Paddy, 48, forgot to release the handbrake and was stationary for 10 seconds in his Alfa Romeo, hitting the steering wheel.
Freddie, 43, joked: “Some of us dealt with pressure better than others.”
Paddy, 48, said: “It wasn’t the pressure of being there, it was the pressure you feel with... these F1 drivers.”
In recent weeks, Paddy admitted he was once arrested... after stealing petrol.
Paddy says in My Lifey that he drove his first car aged 17 with “no licence, no insurance and no MOT.”
He added: “I did have a tax disc. It’d been taken out of somebody’s car.”
His worst experience was getting arrested for siphoning petrol.
“The next thing I knew, I was in the holding cells at Bolton Police Station. The thought of my mum finding out s*** the living daylights out of me.”
He said after that he never went too far. Paddy, now 48, added: “You hear about d***head drivers crashing with no insurance, but in my teenage years those thoughts didn’t enter my head.”
While Flintoff, now 43, reveals in The Book of Fred: “I could have been in the back of a nicked car with some older lads. To this day, I still don’t know if they were joyriding.”
*The new series starts on Sunday, 8pm, on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.
