We chat with Rory Reid about Top Gear’s new season and the reasons why we should tune our TVs this year on the world’s most popular motoring show.
Rory was basically the unknown member of last year’s cast, after being selected through a massive audition procedure, but that doesn’t mean he was new to the game.
Rory Reid has actually years of experience in the automotive journalism, writing and making videos about cars, so if anything, he was the right kind of unknown to enter the Top Gear kingdom. Not to mention, he was one of the only few good things about the show’s not-so-good last season.
[CS = Carscoops, RR = Rory Reid]
CS: Rory, you must be the most hated guy in the community of automotive journalists!
RR: [Laughs] Don’t I know it! I’ve taken everyone’s job it seems!
CS: With the new series right around the corner, how do you feel compared to your first season?
RR: I feel very happy with the work that we’ve done. We’ve had a much longer time to prepare this year compared to the last one. We’ve spent a lot more time in the planning stages, distilling ideas that we think were the best ones and then going off and executing them. I think we ended up with some really, really good films this year.
We’ve also had a lot of time to prepare the studio and we’ve also spent a lot more time with each other as a group, me, Chris and Matt. We’re bouncing off each other nicely now, we’re interacting really well and the stories we’re going to tell on this series I think they are really, really strong.
CS: What changes have you made to the format of the show?
RR: The way the show developed last year was that we made a lot of individual films. All the films I was involved in featured just me, and the same with Chris, he was on his own, doing his own thing. Matt did a couple of individual films but he also did a couple of pieces with the others, but predominantly it was solo missions.
This year is more of a group effort, in terms of taking part in the same challenges and that enables us to have multiple voices in the same film and giving different opinions about different cars and bounce off each other a lot more as well.
Last year we had the opportunity off-camera to bond, whether it was in a hotel bar, or hanging out in Matt’s dressing room or just chatting about cars and having a drink like guys do and we got the chance to know each other really well but we never got the chance to show that on-camera. This year is the first time we have the opportunity to show that, you know, we haven’t just been thrown together. [The chemistry] is been developing and bubbling under the surface.
I think the films we’ve made this year will reflect how well we get on and how similar we are, in terms of our passion for cars and also our differences as well. Matt is into mechanics and getting his fingers dirty, Chris is into high-performance racing and suspension tuning and all this stuff and I’m more like into enjoying the story and the traveling that we do and the aesthetics of a car and things like that.
CS: Not many people know that you were in the business of journalism years before Top Gear entered your life.
RR: I think it’s been around 18 years since I started working as a journalist; I started out in technology journalism when I was like 18. That journalism career enabled me to communicate my passions, which include technology, computer games -back in the day- and the thing I really loved, cars. I diverted away from technology and straight into cars and when that opportunity came up, I kind of grabbed it with both hands. Back then, I was working for CNET and I wanted to launch a car section on the website.
I remember back in the day no one kind of really believed that I could do it, no one [the manufacturers] really wanted to lend me any cars, so I hired a Toyota Prius, put together a film crew and we went out to shoot the film. Then I would send that video to the car manufacturers to show them that we were serious, that we want to make this happen. In the end, I kind of earned their respect and over the years we built this kind of relationship with the manufacturers and now I think I’m one of the most recognized car journalists in the UK within that automotive circle.
I worked long and hard over a period of 10 years to make that happen, and then the opportunity came up to join Top Gear and I also grabbed it with both hands and here we are.
CS: What was the most disappointing car you had to review this year?
RR: None of the cars I reviewed this year have been disappointing I think. I mean you could look at the Renault Twingo GT and think “Ok, Harris got to drive the Ferrari FXX K and Rory got the Twingo GT, that should be disappointing” but the fact is that we put these cars into amazing scenarios, so even if you put that car into the film we put it in, you think “Wow, I would probably rather drive that car [the Twingo GT] in that film than the FXX K”.
Everything we do, even if the car doesn’t appear exciting on the surface, we can guarantee that what we do with it is unbelievable. There’s a Ssangyong Rodius, which is probably the least impressive car I’ve tested in the series, which we turned into a super-yacht, we literally turned it into a yacht and we took it down to Monaco. It was an awesome yacht! And I put on my Admiral outfit and I’m driving along on the sea, it was brilliant.
CS: How fast did that thing go?
RR: It was traveling at 40 knots (46mph), we were racing against proper super yachts! That’s what I want to say, it doesn’t matter what the car is, what matters is how you incorporate it into the Top Gear universe and make an exciting film with it, and we’ve done quite a few of them in this series!
Top Gear Season 24 debuts in BBC America this Sunday, March 12
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