For a bloke who has spent 23 years wandering the world making internationally popular TV car shows - Richard Hammond seems remarkably well adapted to the wilds of Worcestershire.
For more than a decade, he has lived near the market town of Ross-on-Wye but is rapidly becoming better known in the area for a classic car restoration business called The Smallest Cog, established in 2021 on an industrial estate outside Hereford, half an hour from his home.
And for the TV programme Richard Hammond’s Workshop that it has spawned - one of several that have become internationally recognised.
The Smallest Cog was born when a local car restoration team – Neil Greenhouse, son Anthony and brother Andrew, who had done an excellent job of looking after Hammond’s classic car collection for half a dozen years – suddenly lost their rented premises in Hereford.
Not wanting to lose his technician-friends, Hammond suggested they set up a business that would take in outside classic car work as well as continuing to do his own work. That led to the launch of the Discovery TV programme, now heading for its fourth series.
Away from TV, Hammond had always held a desire to have his own car restoration business, which is why he was prepared to sell prime models (a Jaguar E-Type and a pristine Bentley among them) to fund The Smallest Cog’s modern premises that now include latest-spec car lifts, fettling bays and a state-of-the-art paint booth.
There’s even a new mezzanine floor with space for spares, a production office for the TV people and Hammond’s own modest office – into which seven of us crowded one December morning.
Matt Prior and I had come to record, with Hammond’s help, the Christmas edition of our podcast, My Week In Cars.
Join the debate
Add your comment
Utter rubbish. It's one of the commonist elements on earth. Yes, at the moment the mining and extraction can't keep up with demand, but it's being ramped up rapidly to keep up.
In their mad rush foe electric cars, politicians FORGET to mention the simple point pont made here by hammond: IC engines are not dirty or damaging; their fUEL is!
Companies like Porsche and others are working on clean fuels; airlines -mostly via Rolls-Royce- are testing the viability , i.e. supply, of eco-friendly jet-fuel...
As soon as scientists and industrialists can agree on a production system CHEAPER than petrol or diesel, the pollution problem will disappear; at least in those places that can afford to switch to a 'new' infrastructure.
That's particularly problematic with oil products, but is still an issue with synthetic fuel. E-fuel doesn't magically appear, it uses electricity and biomass to generate, so it needs around twice as much of those things to power a combustion engine than a fuel cell. And even in a fuel cell, synthetic fuel / hydrogen uses 3x as much electricity as charging a battery.
So the absolute minimum potential cost of synthetic fuel in a combustion engine is ~6x that of powering an EV, purely in electricity costs - before factoring in the additional tooling and distribution costs. To power every car mile on synthetic fuel, it would mean increasing our electricity production by more than 100%.
It's never going to be a majority solution: it is inherently prohibitively expensive and energy-intensive. The best-case scenario is that e-fuel keeps a small fleet of classic cars on the road, along with long-haul aviation and shipping.
Good luck with creating internal combustion engines that don't emit co2 while, you know, combusting. And who cares what Hammond said? Was it a joke about May and Clarkson?
Yea and guns and bullets don't kill people.