Richard Hammond revealed that when he worked on the Top Gear show, he was forced to sell his Ferrari to pay rent.
Richard is reunited with the car.
The Top Gear show was widely popular when May, Hammond and Clarkson presented it, and ran from 2002 till the mid 2010s until new hosts were introduced.
The Grand Tour Host had “no choice” but to sell the 1998 Ferrari 550 after he needed to pay 6 months rent in advance on a new house.
But more recently, in a video for DriveTribe, Richard was reunited with his old Ferrari!
He said: “I had it for a few years. We were living where we’re living now. A long way from London.
“I was working at Top Gear based in London, to and from, it was just killing me. I wanted us to be together as a family, so we decided, ‘Right, there’s nothing for it, we’re living in a rented house. We’re going to move’.”
Mike Fernie, of DriveTribe, realised the car was up for auction, and invited Richard in an attempt to get him to buy the car back after all these years.
Richard explained how when he met with Mike, and saw the car again, the first memory he was greeted with was the one of the day he had to give up the vehicle.
He explained: “So we gave up on the rented house, we rented another house closer to London and we moved lock, stock and barrel.
“So I had six cars – we shifted them all over there. The last drive I did in this [the Ferrari] was in the lashing rain to the house in Penn, Buckinghamshire. We pulled up outside the house we rented.”
It wasn’t until he moved into his new home with his wife and two daughters that he realised he made a bad choice selling the car.
He continued: “We sort of moved in and it was very smart. We got my girls into another school, they said goodbye to their school, it was the end of their summer term.
“We moved in on the Saturday. Three removal vans… and on the Sunday morning I’d been talking to the girls and I looked at them in this new context.”
Whilst walking that Sunday night, he realised he made a mistake selling the car, and moving down there, so he mentioned it to his family.
Richard continued: “Weirdly I’d gone out to walk the dogs that night and I almost wore this sort of leathery, cowboy hat with a torch on where I live. I suddenly felt silly.
“This doesn’t work for us. We don’t fit here. So the following morning, the removal guys came to take the last few bits and I said put it all back on.
“So they put it all back on the truck. The house we’d been renting, let’s have that one again.”
Unfortunately, even though he wanted to move back home, he still had to pay 6 months rent on the new home like he agreed to.
He concluded: “But, the guy I rented the house from in Penn held me to six months of rent, which amounted to what this [the Ferrari] was worth.
“I mean, I wasn’t flat broke, I had a Ferrari, but I had no income to cover it.”
