Richard Hammond has hinted that Top Gear could return to screens, despite the BBC shelving the motoring series after Freddie Flintoff’s near-fatal crash.
The presenter, who fronted the show alongside Jeremy Clarkson and James May for 13 years, claimed the broadcaster had a history of “resting” the programme before reviving it in a new format.
Top Gear has been on indefinite pause since December 2022, when former England cricket captain Flintoff was seriously injured during filming.
Reflecting on the show’s long history, Hammond, who survived a high-speed dragster crash while filming in 2006, said: “It's been off-air before. It's been on and off air for the last 40 odd years. It is a BBC-owned show, it was a magazine show about cars, and it's gone through various incarnations.
“It had been off the air for a few years when we took it on, and then we did our thing with it, and then they gave it on to another team, and they did their thing.
“Yes, it ended after Freddie's crash, and my reaction to that was, 'oh god, poor Freddie, that sounds awful',” he told the Oxford Mail. “To the show being taken off air, the BBC has big-name shows that it rests, and then it brings back.”
After leaving Top Gear in 2015 alongside Clarkson and May, Hammond reunited with the pair for Amazon Prime Video’s The Grand Tour, which aired its final episode last year.
Since their departure, the BBC has trialled several presenting line-ups before settling on Flintoff, Paddy McGuinness and Chris Harris.
Meanwhile, the show’s former trio; Hammond, May and Clarkson, have been keeping busy with their separate pursuits since the end of The Grand Tour.
Clarkson presents Clarkson’s Farm about his farm in Oxfordshire on Prime Video, Hammond helms his car restoration show, Richard Hammond’s Workshop, and May appears in James May and the Dull Men on Discovery+.
The Grand Tour ended last summer after six series with its special final episode, One For The Road, in Botswana.
May later said it was time for a “new generation” to helm the show.
"We’d exhausted the subject, we are getting on a bit. I believe it’s time for a new generation to find a new take - I don’t know what it is,” he said on Sunday Brunch in February.
When asked by host Simon Rimmer if the decision felt right, he said: "Yes, I think so.
“You can’t overstay your welcome. You’re supposed to leave the audience wanting more. It’s the rule of show business."
The Grand Tour will reportedly be returning with a new presenting line-up.
The new hosts are thought to be YouTubers Thomas Holland and James Engelsman, who co-host the channel Throttle House, and social media star Francis Bourgeois.
