The producer of one of the BBC’s most recognisable TV shows has opened up on how Lewis Hamilton overruled his formidable Formula 1 team boss to make an appearance
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Lewis Hamilton once went against McLaren boss Ron Dennis who was reluctant to let him make a BBC TV appearance(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
As a seven-time Formula 1 world champion, most would agree that Lewis Hamilton has earned the right to decide how to best spend his time. As it turns out, he was not yet even a title-winner in F1 when he first overruled his boss in his personal desire to make an appearance on one of his favourite TV shows.
Andy Wilman, the former chief producer of Top Gear, has opened up on how Hamilton first made an appearance on the show’s popular ‘Star in a Reasonable Priced Car’ segment. Over the years, dozens of celebrities and a handful of F1 stars were given the keys to an unremarkable road car and told to set the fastest lap time possible around their test track in Dunsfold, Surrey.
Hamilton appeared more than once but his first appearance came after just one season in F1, in which he had just missed out on the title after a bitter battle with McLaren team-mate Fernando Alonso.
The ‘reasonably priced car’ used by Top Gear at the time as a light blue Suzuki Liana and, as it turned out, that was a sticking point when it came to convincing McLaren to let Hamilton appear. The Brit was also affiliated with Mercedes and team principal Ron Dennis was hesitant to let the driver get into the car that Top Gear wanted him to.
“The first time he came down, I think it was when he just lost that rookie season, the championship by [one point],” Wilman told the Midweek F1 podcast. “So McLaren, still [in the] Ron Dennis days, so we were getting all Ron Dennis-ish-ness coming down the phone, ‘He’s in a Suzuki Liana’, you know?
“And then like I think it was Matt Bishop was a PR at the time. Matt Bishop sort of rings and he goes, ‘Oh, Ron wants him to do it in like an SLR’. And we’re like, ‘It’s not the point, like… [everyone has the] same car’.
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Lewis Hamilton later returned for a second Top Gear appearance in 2013(Image: PA)
“And he went, ‘Yeah, you know what Ron’s like’. And Ron’s gone, ‘Yeah, but he’s a Mercedes man’. And we’re like, ‘Jesus Christ, Ron, is anybody going to go, well, I’m going to buy a Liana now. I won’t buy that S-Class’. It’s like, let it go!”
As it turned out, whether or not Dennis caved was immaterial as Hamilton, back then a fan of the show and its famous trio of presenters – Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May – took it upon himself to decide that he was going to make the appearance anyway.
Wilman added: “And then I think Lewis stepped in even as a kid and went, ‘I’m doing Top Gear’, because he was such a kid and he’d grown up watching it, so it was a red-letter day for him. Now, obviously now he’s stratospheric and everything bows to him, but back then he was like, ‘I’m coming down’.”
The track was wet on that first day Hamilton appeared which hampered his efforts to top the timesheets, though he did set the quickest time of any F1 driver to drive on Top Gear when he returned for a second go on a drier day. But before the show ended, he would be beaten by Daniel Ricciardo who managed to go seven-tenths of a second quicker in the same Liana.