Richard Hammond's WorkshopThe Grand Tour

Richard Hammond Outlines Financial Issues As Restoration Company Hits milestone: “This Is Expensive To Run”

The Grand Tour host Richard Hammond has made an appearance on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with Sky to promote his second series of Richard Hammond’s Workshop, which has just been released on Discovery+.

It will be a ten-part series and follows Hammond running a classic car restoration and repair workshop, which has been one of his lifelong dreams. Viewers saw Hammond setting the business up in the first series and after almost a year the business is still struggling to turnover a profit. The former Top Gear host explained to Evans:

“So, end of the first season, it’s set up. The second season, which begins tonight, we’re like, ‘Here’s the workshop, isn’t it amazing? Wow! This is expensive to run, isn’t it?’ So then it’s all about keeping it going.”

He continued:

“The delicious irony was, in order to pay for a lot of the kit I needed to put into the classic car restoration workshop, in which one day I hoped to restore my own cars, I had to sell my own cars!”

Hammond, who runs the workshop business with Neil, Anthony and Andrew Greenhouse, spoke about how they came to do this together:

“We established fish and chip Fridays, where I’d turn up if I wasn’t working, with fish and chips, and we’d all sit around and eat them and chat, and one Friday we were chatting and Neil was a bit down, and he said, ‘I’m losing the workshop, they’re developing it,’

“And I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to employ you to work directly to me, to do my cars, because, a: I’m not Jay Leno, and b: there’s not a great deal of dignity in that for you. So, why don’t we set up a business together, and we’ll get a little workshop, and once you’ve covered your costs you’ll be able to work on my cars?’”

Viewers will be seeing Hammond’s wife, Mindy, having a closer look at how he runs the business, Hammond attempting to teach his daughter, Willow, to drive, and Hammond trying to impress hopeful clients at a high-end car event. Hammond went on to explain to Evans that the business is real and it doesn’t just switch off when filming ends. He said:

“This is a real entity, so we’re still filming this series as it goes out. We wrap in two weeks, but then the business carries on. It’s not like we go, ‘Oh that’s it, it’s over.’

“The cameras leave… and then we are going to knuckle down and we have got to get this thing working.

“It’s business-led, and the TV just has to follow along.”

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