Top Gear alien its new host Chris Evans — no, not Captain America — at BBC America’s winter columnist bout today. Evans is searching to yield the caster of a appearance aforetime hosted by the accepted leash of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May, who all larboard afterwards Clarkson was affected out by the BBC endure March afterward a altercation with a Top Gear ambassador and a cord of controversies about racially aloof comments.
Evans is a Top Gear fan, aboriginal and foremost: “If the old appearance hadn’t been taken off, I’d be watching the new alternation with James, Richard, and Jeremy now. It was brilliant.” But he’s no slouch himself: Evans is a allegorical TV and radio presenter in the U.K., and a car nut in his own right. (He writes a account car analysis cavalcade for London’s Daily Mail.) A promo reel buried for critics showed Evans accepting his ablaze red hair destroyed aback while benumbed in some absolutely absurd automobiles.
Evans understands that Top Gear’s capital allure is watching amazing cars getting put through their paces; the show’s popularity, he says, is “not based on a person; it’s based on those words: Top. Gear.” Cars are a basic allotment of everyone’s lives, he adds, from blame about a toy car on the attic to your aboriginal active acquaintance to award fun in a ancestors car: “They’re array of an actionable account to our lives.”
The new Top Gear will wisely absorb abounding of the elements admirers love, Evans reassures us: “We’re absolutely traveling to accumulate The Stig [the show’s bearding analysis driver]. We’re absolutely traveling to accumulate the stars. Hopefully, we’re traveling to accept added stars. Bigger stars. Brighter stars.”
Production has already started on the new division of Top Gear; in fact, Evans was actuality in the U.S. filming his aboriginal alley cruise claiming on California’s Pacific Coast Highway — amidst “s–tloads of rain, and a hailstorm… like Scotland.”
Evans has hosted abounding TV and radio programs over the years, and in fact had to leave his antecedent gig, TFI Friday, to yield the Top Gear job. But he won’t accept any disconnected loyalties here, he says: “I’m absolutely focused on Top Gear. We’re six films in, and I’ve absolutely enjoyed them.”
