Richard Hammond
Corporate events live or die on the room in the first five minutes. A clumsy host flattens the agenda, drains the energy from the awards, and turns a senior audience into a polite one. The fix is a presenter who can carry a room of executives without making the brief about himself.
Richard Hammond is a British television presenter and author who hosts corporate events, awards ceremonies, and after-dinner sets for senior audiences, drawing on more than two decades of work on Top Gear and The Grand Tour.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Richard Hammond
- A face audiences already trust. Two decades on Top Gear and The Grand Tour means a senior room recognises him the moment he walks on, which shortens the warm-up and lifts the agenda.
- Hosting craft built in live broadcast. Hammond reads a room the way a presenter reads a studio, which is the specific skill awards nights and corporate dinners need.
- Storytelling drawn from genuine high-stakes experience. The 2006 Vampire crash and the 2017 Rimac crash give him material that lands without rehearsal because it actually happened.
- Entrepreneurial second act. DriveTribe and The Smallest Cog give Hammond credible commercial experience to draw on when a brief calls for substance beyond hosting, particularly in automotive, media, and brand-building contexts.
- Comfortable across formats. Awards host, after-dinner speaker, panel moderator, fireside Q and A; he does not need a single staged format to work.
Biography highlights
- Co-presenter, Top Gear, BBC Two, 2002 to 2015, with Jeremy Clarkson and James May.
- Co-presenter, The Grand Tour, Amazon Prime Video, 2016 to 2024.
- Author of On the Edge: My Story (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2008) and As You Do (Orion, 2007).
- Founder of The Smallest Cog, a classic car restoration business in Hereford, opened 2021.
- Co-founder of DriveTribe, the automotive content platform launched in 2016.
- Presenter of Brainiac: Science Abuse (Sky One), Total Wipeout (BBC One), and Richard Hammond’s Workshop (Discovery+).
Biography
Top Gear ran for thirteen years on BBC Two with three presenters who became, between them, one of the most exported television properties in British broadcasting history. Hammond was the smallest of the three on screen and the one audiences most often warmed to first. That recognition is the asset corporate buyers are buying when they put him on a stage.
Hosting a room of senior executives is closer to live television than to keynote speaking. The host has to set the tempo, hand off cleanly between segments, recover from a missed cue, and keep the audience with the agenda rather than ahead of it. Hammond has spent more than twenty years doing exactly this work, first across local BBC radio, then across motoring television, and most consistently as one third of the Top Gear and Grand Tour line-up.
The 2006 Vampire dragster crash at RAF Elvington gave him a recovery story that has become its own asset. He was travelling at 288 mph when the tyre failed; he spent two weeks in a coma; he wrote about the recovery in On the Edge in 2008. When the brief calls for an after-dinner set with substance behind the laughs, that material is genuinely his.
Beyond broadcast, Hammond has a working business in The Smallest Cog, the Hereford classic car restoration workshop he opened in 2021, and a media platform in DriveTribe, which he co-founded with Clarkson and May in 2016 and now runs himself. Both give him commercial ground to stand on when a brief moves from hosting into something closer to a fireside conversation about reinvention, brand, or the economics of motoring media.
Key speaking topics
- Awards hosting and ceremony presenting
- Corporate after-dinner sets
- Automotive media and broadcast
- Recovery and return after the 2006 Vampire crash
- Building DriveTribe and The Smallest Cog
- The Top Gear and Grand Tour years
- Engineering, performance cars, and motoring journalism
Ideal for
- Annual award nights and industry awards ceremonies
- Corporate dinners, gala evenings and partner events
- Automotive sector conferences and dealer events
- Brand activations and customer hospitality with a motoring or engineering audience
Audience outcomes
- An evening that runs on tempo, with a host who keeps the agenda moving without flattening it.
- A first-hand account of the 2006 crash and recovery that anchors the room when the brief calls for it.
- A working perspective on automotive broadcast, classic car restoration, and the commercial side of motoring media.
- The recognition value of a presenter the audience already watches at home.