Living in the fast lane has taking its toll on Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May.
The trio rose to fame living fast and free testing out supercars, performing stunts, and going on whimsical trips on Top Gear.
But the battering their bodies have taken is starting to catch up on them after 12 years on the BBC’s once flagship motoring programme, followed by 46 episodes of their popular Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour.
Clarkson, Hammond, and May have all in recent years opened up to varying degrees about their health struggles.
Most recent of those was Clarkson, 64, who today revealed he was ‘maybe’ days from death before he earlier this week underwent emergency heart surgery.
2003: Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond have spent the last two decades running their bodies through the mire testing supercars and performing stunts
2024: But the battering on their bodies is starting to catch up with them after 12 years on the BBC’s Top Gear, followed by 46 episodes of their popular Amazon Prime show The Grand Tour
He looked weary in an Instagram post two days ago with the scars from his two hours on the operating table seemingly visible by what appeared to be a surgical plaster on his wrist.
Although he didn’t need a heart bypass, the health scare has been enough to shock meat-eater Clarkson into rethinking his diet as he contemplates ways to ‘make celery interesting’.
The deterioration, he said, was ‘sudden’ after a short swim in the Indian Ocean towards a beach on a ‘small island’ left him feeling ‘mostly dead’.
The demise in his health gathered pace upon his return to Britain when he began to feel ‘clammy’, ‘tightness in my chest’, and ‘pins and needles in my left arm’.
The recent tragic death of Alex Salmond from a massive heart attack was in the forefront of Clarkson’s mind and he knew he needed to see a GP.
That day he was taken by ambulance to the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, home to a £29million heart specialist centre.
He said he then went to an ‘operating theatre’ on Wednesday, after further checks, and doctors said he was perhaps ‘days away’ from death.
Once there he was fitted with a stent to his hold his arteries open, to improve blood flow to his heart and relieve his chest pain.
A stent is a wire mesh tube that props open arteries. To open the narrowed artery, the surgeon may perform what’s known as an angioplasty.
Clarkson looked weary in an Instagram post two days ago with the scars from his two hours on the operating table seemingly visible by what appeared to be a surgical plaster on his wrist
Clarkson posted a video on Instagram this week about the books he read while on his recent holiday and said none were as good as his Diddly Squat Home to Roost
This involves making a small incision in a patient’s arm or leg, through which a wire with an attached deflated balloon is thread through up to the coronary arteries
Describing what he called the ‘wearisome effects of growing old’, Clarkson said: ‘It seems that of the arteries feeding my heart with nourishing blood, one was completely blocked and the second of three was heading that way.’
He said a stent, which can save lives and stop future heart attacks through improving blood flow to the heart, was fitted in around two hours.
The motoring journalist said: ‘It wasn’t especially painful. Just odd,’ and added that he has been thinking: ‘Crikey, that was close.’
May is three years Clarkson’s junior but he as recently as September admitted his time on the road had left him feeling ‘old and frail’.
Clarkson, too, said he felt ‘too old and fat’ to carry on.
May told GB News that his health played a part in him calling time on The Grand Tour as he realised his body couldn’t take any more of the stress that had been exerted on it over the last two decades.
‘I won’t really miss the stress of it because I’m old now and a bit frail compared with back then (when we started),’ May said.
‘In the end, we got to the point where we said, “No, we must stop whilst we’re still vaguely ahead. We mustn’t keep going until we embarrass ourselves”,’ he added.
‘I’ve always said if it ends tomorrow, which it nearly did at one point, that I should just be grateful that I had the opportunity.’
In 2019, May told The Sun that he wanted to stop soon because he didn’t want to ‘fall apart’ in the public glare.
He said: ‘How do I feel about ageing? Bad. I’m in the second half of my fifties now and in all honesty, I’m slightly falling apart.
‘I’m developing nervous disorders and aches and I don’t think I’ll do this much longer because I don’t want to fall apart in public.
‘It would just be a bit undignified and I don’t think people want to see it.’
Shocking: He nearly lost his life when he was involved in a 320mph crash while filming a Top Gear stunt at York’s Elvington airfield back in 2006
Near miss: He endured a second brush with death after his £2 million Rimac supercar careered off a hill and burst into flames as he raced at high speed through rural Switzerland in 2017
‘I’m too scared to find out’: Richard Hammond has revealed his dementia fear as a result of the 2006 320mph car crash which left him with with a brain bleed and a one-minute memory
Hammond, Clarkson, and May have all had health scares in recent years. May and Clarkson both admitted that their age led them deciding to call time on The Grand Tour
As for Hammond, he is still feeling the lasting effects from his horrific 319mph crash in 2006 filming a Top Gear stunt.
Hammond, 54, was put in a coma for two weeks after the near-fatal crash and suffered serious injuries, including a frontal lobe brain injury.
This year he told The Sunday Times in a candid interview that his memory was ‘getting shaky.
Hammond has also raised fears that his injuries might have caused onset dementia.
Talking on The Diary of a CEO podcast, he said: ‘I worry about my memory because it’s not brilliant. I can still read a script and deliver it but my long-term memory is not brilliant.
‘I have to write things down and work hard to remember them sometimes. It might be the age, it might be the onset of something else, I worry about that. I do, I do.
‘I should probably have a look and find out, because I do.’
Host Steven Bartlett asked him: ‘Are you scared of finding out?’
He said: ‘I am because it was a bleed on the front. It could mean there is an increased risk. I need to find out. I’ve been too scared to do it. I need to do it.
‘Weirdly on the way here, I had to stop off for a medical for a production. They ask “Have you been involved in any accidents?” I’m like “Woooah! Can I have another piece of paper please?”
‘I need to book myself in for one of those mid-life MOTs and check everything. I wanted to ask them to check there is nothing going awry up here (pointing to his head). But I chickened out. Didn’t.
May is three years Clarkson’s junior but he as recently as September admitted his time on the road had left him feeling ‘old and frail’
May (pictured during his time on Channel 4 show Driven in 1998) has been fronting motoring shows for nearly three decades
May (pictured in September during a Q&A event) told GB News that his health played a part in him calling time on The Grand Tour as he realised his body couldn’t take any more of the stress
May (pictured enjoying a pint of beer) said ‘I’ve always said if it ends tomorrow, which it nearly did at one point, that I should just be grateful that I had the opportunity’
‘That means I probably need an MRI scan but at 53, your memory does start to get a bit… they call it lost key syndrome.
‘I am quite forgetful, generally thinking about something else, the next thing and therefore I do drop the ball, I forget stuff a lot. That’s just me. That’s who I am.’
After the crash, which saw his Vampire jet car lose control and flip upside down after a tyre burst, he admitted to suffering from depression.
He said: ‘I have no recollection because there was the frontal lobe bleed. I was just decelerating upside down, using my head as a brake, which isn’t good for you.’
He added: ‘Mindy (his wife), was told by the doctors that a frontal brain lobe injury would possibly lead to me having a greater propensity for obsessive compulsion and depression and paranoia.
‘Mindy was like, “You didn’t meet him before the crash, did you?” which is quite funny to be fair. I think I did suffer a bit, I suffered all of those things to a degree.
‘Some of them were really weird moments and I still get an echo of it.
‘I remember having been institutionalized for a really long time in hospitals and in recovery… I would be coming into London to do something.
‘I would open the wardrobe door and just look at all the shirts and just trying to work out.. it was too much. I found choice really difficult for quite a long time.’
He continued: ‘Feeling your emotions derailed or interfered with because of a neurochemical imbalance, it’s just chemicals and electricity.
‘I was walking across the drive of my house and I felt this sudden welling, this surge of love in my chest and I thought, what’s that?
‘Eventually I identified it, I had walked past my old Land Rover, which I do love but only because I quite like it, but it had just triggered this absolutely… I thought blimey, it made me think.
‘If emotions can be that profoundly affected by what was just a mix-up up of chemicals and electricity in my head, then I am more aware of things.
‘Now, I don’t listen to my emotions too closely if I am very very tired or if I have had a big night out with the boys the night before.
‘If I have drink red wine the I do not tune it to see what I think about anything. It’s irrelevant for a day. Those are the rules.
‘I was angry for a while, Anger is a problem when recovering from a brain injury. I wanted a T-shirt that said on the front, “I am OK, stop asking” and on the back, “I am still poorly, you know”.’
In 2017, Hammond was involved in a second crash and was airlifted to hospital in Switzerland while filming Amazon’s The Grand Tour.
The accident took place in the town of St Gallen in north-east Switzerland. Richard had to be pulled from the wreckage of a Rimac supercar worth £2m that later burst into flames.
And during his latest interview, Richard also spoke about health anxiety.
He said: ‘It’s not surprising that we don’t want to face it. I do practice a bit of mindfulness and as you get older, talking about it makes it easier.
‘You don’t have to imagine a world without you in it because you wont be in it.’
And speaking about the aftermath of the crash, Richard said: ‘ I had very bad post traumatic amnesia for weeks
‘Like a one-minute memory. Mindy my wife said I was the nicest I had ever been. Lovely apparently.
‘I was perfectly happy reading the same newspaper every single day several times a day until Mindy took it away because she was sick of seeing me read it.
‘If someone is in that confused state for whatever reason, if they are happy, they are happy. All you’ve got to do is cope to support them in that. It doesn’t matter if they cant remember who you are. And I was.’
