Top Gear’s new American presenter got a 1984 Nissan pickup truck from his dad as a first car, but since then he’s been stepping up his game, going through a couple of Ferraris before settling for a very scary Porsche. He also finds rear-engined cars to be the fastest.
Chris “Shorter Clarkson” Evans called up his new colleague Matt “Taller Hammond” LeBlanc on his Radio 2 show to talk about about private bars, air mile claims and apexes. When asked about his love affair with Porsche, LeBlanc explained in detail why he thinks his 997 GT2 would be hard to beat, according to the BBC:
That one scares me. You know, I had a Ferrari and it was a great car, and I’ve had some other cars too, but the thing about the Porsch is that it just feels like the most practical, real-world supercar, you know what I mean? It does everything, you can go to the store in it, it’s not too ostentatious. And the rear engined car...nothing comes off the apex like a rear-engined car.
You can go to power quicker I think in a rear-engined car. So, you kind of have to go easy on the brakes. You can’t really trail-brake too hard of it will swing around on you. But you can pick up the throttle quicker.
Well, call me convinced.
LeBlanc is really enthusiastic about the job, and also wants to invite F1 driver Romain Grosjean and actor Stephen Mangan from Episodes on the show, who’s a ‘crazy competitive lunatic’, apparently. Evans is fine with that, but the possibility of skipping Top Gear to shoot new Friends episodes would be out of the question, unsurprisingly.
Top Gear’s first new road trip is already booked, but for even more details, listen to the whole conversation over at the BBC:
Photo credit: Getty Images
Contact the author at mate@jalopnik.com.