Richard Hammond offers kind words to the new Grand Tour presenters

Richard Hammond has admitted he's not sure whether Top Gear as we knew it could happen again, and weighed in on the new presenters of his other series The Grand Tour.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Hammond who co-hosted the BBC show from 2002 to 2015 put much of the success down to luck and timing.

According to Hammond, the original Top Gear was "a big car adventure show fronted by three misshapen idiots" adding there was appetite for "a little window into how the average male brain works."

"If we launched it now, there might be none.”

Richard Hammond co-hosted Top Gear alongside Jeremy Clarkson and James May from 2002, turning the BBC motoring show into one of the corporation’s biggest global hits.

That run ended in 2015, when Clarkson was found to have assaulted a producer following a dispute over catering, and the BBC chose not to renew his contract.

Hammond and May left with him, and the trio soon reunited at Amazon’s Prime Video, where they launched The Grand Tour later that year. The show kept the familiar mix of supercars, cross-continental road trips and banter, and it has since run for several seasons, with its format of big-budget specials becoming a trademark. More recently, new presenters have taken over the hosting duties.

Top Gear continued with a revolving door of presenters for a number of years but failed to ever reach the success of the twilight years of Hammond, May and Clarkson. In 2022, presenter Freddie Flintoff was involved in a near-fatal car accident during filming that caused the show to go on hiatus.

The BBC announced earlier this year that Top Gear is set to return to the air in a rebooted version, with new presenters yet to be announced.

Meanwhile The Grand Tour bid farewell to the iconic trio in 2024 with the show relaunching in 2026 with another trio of presenters Thomas Holland, James Engelsman and Francis Bourgeois

In a separate interview with Radio Times, Hammond was asked what he makes of hosts to which he replied: "I wish them the very best. From what I can see, the audience is giving them space and time to find their own way of working, which is what they need. They have to find 'their' show. Good luck to them."