To what extent are you still a car enthusiast?
That’s a good question. With a certain type of car, very enthusiastic, but I really struggle to be enthused or excited by anything on the market today. Anything that bongs and beeps at me or takes control of the steering or the braking, I’m just not interested in that. I had a car the other day, told me to sit up straight. It was a Toyota. What? Sit up straight. What’s next, clean your teeth? And so I’m infuriated by that. I find quite a lot of the cars very similar. When I was much younger, I used to be able to drive down the motorway at night and even when the taillights were 200 yards in front of me, I knew what [type of] car it was. And as often as not, whether it was an L or a GL or a GLS. Whereas now, even in broad daylight, when I’m six feet away from a car, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was. So I’m enthusiastic about cars that I remember.

You can get rid of the bongs and beeps though, can’t you?
It just takes time. When I get into the car, if I’m going over to the brewery or work stuff going round the farm, I really don’t have the time to faff about on the touchscreen, turning everything off. That’s why my Range Rover is 18 years old. It doesn’t bong at me. Don’t even have to wear a seatbelt in that, which, when you’re on the farm, is an absolute blessing.

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There’s a celebrated piece of video, isn’t there, where you and (evo magazine founder) Harry Metcalfe do a bit of a love-in with the [Range Rover] L322…
Well, it’s interesting that we’re both in very much the same line of work. You know, we both write about cars, talk about cars, and we both have a farm each. And yet both of us drive the same-coloured Tonga Green L322. And both of us agree it has – I think it was Harry that came up with the line – the DNA of a Transit van. I could take it to London and park it outside the Royal Opera House. Not that I ever would go to the Royal Opera House, but you know what I mean.

When you talked about your car enthusiasm, we assumed you were going to say, ‘I’m a bit on the backburner now because I do so much other stuff…’
But you can still be interested. It’s really strange. I don’t know whether it’s the same for you, but there used to be the thing about working in a chocolate factory when if you went to work for Cadbury’s or Bournville or whoever it might be, they allowed you to eat as much chocolate as you liked, on the basis that after a week, you would never want to put chocolate in your mouth ever again. I’ve been doing it since I was 28, but I still haven’t lost the thrill of a good car.

You’re still a good reviewer. There’s a lot of people in newspapers who wouldn’t know a good car if you drove it up their backside.
It’s very kind of you to say that I can still review them because I look at hybrids and I have no clue. I don’t know what a kilowatt hour is. No clue.

But you do it from the point of view of the reader, don’t you?
You should know how the car was put together. I think if you’re a really good reviewer. I’ve never forgotten that CAR magazine piece about the drive back with the Lambos (‘Convoy!’, in the February 1977 issue of CAR, about driving in a convoy of three Lamborghinis from Italy to the UK – Ed)

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That was (former Wheels writer) Mel Nichols…
That was proper motoring journalism. That was a man who understood how those cars worked, understood why they had those V12s and the firing order written out on the top of the engine and so on, and made it live and made the drive so that you felt, oh my God, I wish I could drive a Lamborghini across Europe.

Do you still read much about cars?
No, I don’t read car magazines anymore. I think for a frighteningly large number of the population there’s still mass confusion about EVs. I’m forever running into people who say, ‘I’ll never get into one.’ Or get cross with me for not having got into one.

Do you imagine one in the family?
No, never. I’ve never had an electric car. Not in a million years. I don’t understand them and I don’t like the driving characteristics. I think if you take a car’s engine away, you’ve taken away its soul.

Do you collect cars?
I’ve got a few relics from The Grand Tour that I didn’t want to just say goodbye to. So I’ve got the GTV6 that we used in Scotland and I’ve got the Monte Carlo.

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You got a door on it again?
The door’s back on it and it’s been mildly put back because it was fairly battered when it got back. It sort of works. It’s not restored by any means, but you can pootle around in it and it’s fun. And then I’ve got the Lincoln Continental that we used on The Grand Tour. I’ve got a Mercedes Grosser, I’ve got a Mini. So I’ve got a few cars. I don’t go out and buy them, I just inherited them. And obviously no more Grand Tours now. No more inheriting old interesting cars that cost a fortune to insure and run. It’s amazing how cars go wrong when you’re not looking at them…

Are you sorry The Grand Tour is over?
Not even slightly. I don’t miss it. I’m glad we did it. We had an enormous amount of fun doing it, but it’s quite physical. It’s much harder to do than you might imagine. And the world is a much smaller place now. Think of the trips we’ve done over the recent past: Ukraine, can’t go there anymore. Russia, can’t go there anymore. We landed in Iran, drove into Turkey, down through Syria, through Homs, into Jordan, into Israel. Can’t do any of that. No, the whole of North Africa, with the exception of Morocco, is gone. We’ve done Namibia, we’ve done Mozambique, we’ve done Botswana.

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Tell us about your first car.
A Ford Cortina, 1600E. Ten years old when I got it. My dad had one and I loved it. Amber gold. And it was the later one where the dash dipped down.

Did you crash the car?
I crashed my mother’s Audi 36 hours after passing my driving test. When the examiner said, ‘Well, congratulations, you passed’, what I heard was, ‘Congratulations, you are literally the best driver I’ve ever seen in my life’. And then 36 hours later, just by Town Hill in the Yorkshire Dales, I proved demonstrably that I was not the best driver.

In the ditch?
No, it sort of went through a ditch and then over a little jump and both front wheels came off. It was a good crash. Actually, they didn’t come off. They were bent like that. So I got out on my side and I thought, ‘There’s no damage, I’ve got away with it.’ And a friend of mine got out on the other side and he’s going, ‘Oh yeah, no, nothing on here.’ So we thought, we can go back home. Nobody need know about this.

Where did your cars go from there?
I got a job selling Paddington Bears and I had a Scirocco Mk1 GLi. People think of them as GTis… but the original Mk1 Scirocco.

Was that a lower tune than a GTi?
No, it was a GTi engine, 1588cc, 110 horsepower. You know, the same as you got with the Bosch K-Jetronic in the original Golf GTi, but it was called a GLi. Then I had a Mark II Scirocco. Then I had a CSL. BMW sold that for £3250. Then an Alfa GTV6. I did a few long termers when I was doing car magazine stuff. And then I sort of bought that Range Rover.

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How long ago?
Eighteen years I’ve had that.

How long have you had this farm?
[In] 2008 I bought the farm. I’ve lived in this neck of the woods for 30 years. Well, between here and
London, whereas now it’s here and I go to London once a fortnight.

Just talking about cars and buying them. Is there anything that you’d like to own?
Yes, LFA and a Lamborghini Revuelto, which actually is the exception that proves the rule on new cars, because I truly love that thing. It’s just so unbelievably exciting. It’s what a Lamborghini should be. I’ve always liked Lambos.

You owned one.
I did, I had a Gallardo. I had a Ferrari about then as well. And a Ford GT. My mid-engine supercar phase. I’m never going back there.

You can’t see out of them, can you?
You can’t see out of them. I loathe putting luggage in the front of a car. It’s just wrong. And then every time you pull up somewhere, you just feel a little bit embarrassed. We wax lyrical about the gullwing doors on an SLS Mercedes. I can remember once sitting in London waiting for there to be nobody walking by before I got out of it because in a minute I’m going to do that with the door and everyone’s going to think, ‘what an ass that man is’. And so you have to wait for no one to be looking before you get out.

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Would there be a plan for you to buy a Lambo?
No, no, an LFA still lives in my head. The LFA has got a Zippo lighter for a fuel tank. It’s honestly more practical having an electric car than one of those, you just have to stop all the time. It’s the sound it makes, goes back to the engine.

Beautifully made, though, don’t you think?
Stunning. And I got the loveliest letter from the kid who engineered it. He’s the young guy at Toyota who they put in charge of the project. And when the LFA came out, the reviews were kind of…

I can remember us not getting excited.
Nobody did. CAR, evo, nobody got excited about it at all. And then I drove it and I was priapic, it was astounding. The sound. The ‘wounded bear’ is how I described it, the wailing noise. This is just perfection. And it was front engined. I thought, oh my God, this is absolute joy. And I got the loveliest, loveliest letter from the guy. He said ‘nobody really got my car until you came along’.

How did your newspaper career writing about cars come about?
I was in Wallingford, selling Paddingtons [and] was utterly miserable. There was a local newspaper office at the lights, the Wallingford Gazette or whatever it might have been. I was thinking, ‘I wonder if they’ve got a motoring correspondent’. You know, it’s just what I wanted to do. I thought, well, they won’t have. And then I thought, no local newspaper has, not little ones. So why don’t I set up an agency that can write one road test and then sell it to them, quite cheaply. This didn’t go down well with our colleagues. Jonathan Gill and I set up the Motoring Press Agency. We did that for quite a number of years with absolutely no success initially.

But it worked out in the end, didn’t it?
We were working in Jonathan’s house, and then we’d take a photograph of whatever car we had that week, and we’d go all the way up to the West End to have the photographs printed, and we’d write the review and then put it in an envelope to the Wolverhampton Express or Lincolnshire Life or whatever it might be, and then go and drink in the pub until it was time for Dangermouse. And then we’d watch Dangermouse, by which time the pub was open again. There were two of us, and I think the first year we made £1800 between us. So we weren’t terribly successful, but I did watch a lot of Dangermouse.

What do you reckon there is to look forward to in coming years?
In the world of cars? I despair. You very rarely see a government going, ‘oh, let’s give everyone a bit more freedom’. They don’t. They take a bit and then they’ll take a bit more. Somebody once said that if the motorcar had been invented today, no government in the world would allow ordinary citizens to drive it. You want to drive a 250-mile-an-hour, two-tonne box? Not a chance. I don’t see the point of self-driving cars, just can’t understand them at all.

There are a whole crop of cars now that if you park them nose to tail, it’s very difficult to tell one from the next. But we still hope…
You look at China and BYD has gone from nothing… well, unheard of three or four years ago, to becoming gigantic, bigger than Tesla, in no time at all. And they will dominate. And the Chinese, if you look at the interesting car makers over here in Ferrari, Aston, Bentley, Rolls… their sales are in freefall now in China. They’ve got tariffs in America. There’s a whiff of socialism all around Europe. You know, it’s just slightly not the done thing to be driving a fancy car anymore. And if you take the fancy cars out of the equation, the ones that interest us, you’re left with Volkswagen Touaregs. Well, Volkswagen is not in a million years going to be able to compete with Geely. They don’t have access to the cobalt. They don’t have access to the raw materials that they need. They’ve got styling and heritage, and that’s no match for half the price.

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Plus the weight of cars these days. No wonder there are more potholes… how are they around here?
Sometimes you get caught out, but I do know where the nasty ones are. One of the happiest moments I’ve had in motoring in a number of years [happened recently]. It was a horrible wet, cold day and I was driving through Charlbury Village not far from here, and there was a really old man coming along, shuffling along, bent over double and he saw the E-Type. He stood up straight and beamed. And it brought such joy. It was a great moment because you think everywhere you go in a nice car, you tend to get called names. Not necessarily very nice names. It was so nice to see somebody genuinely just so happy. You just know he’d be going home to wherever he lives and saying, ‘you won’t believe what I’ve just seen…’

You don’t get that in a modern supercar but you do in a nice restomod…
You definitely don’t get let out of side junctions in a Porsche. You’re going to be there a lot longer than if you were in a Renault Five.

Have you ever owned a Porsche?
No. I sort of rather took up against James and Richard on that one. They love the 911, so it was sort of my duty to not love it, even though actually, I think they’re pretty good cars. Lisa really wants one.

Richard claims that his 911 got him the job on Top Gear.
No, no, it was him being funny [that] got him the job. I thought it was ridiculous, a left-hand drive 911 SC. Terrible, rusty old heap. it demonstrated that he was committed, that’s for sure. I just thought it was a Beetle. No, he was funny, that’s the main reason, it’s the most important thing you can be.

This story first appeared in the May 2026 issue of Wheels magazine, now on sale. Subscribe here and gain access to 12 issues for $109 plus online access to every Wheels issue since 1953.