Background and career
James Daniel May (born 16 January 1963) is an English television presenter, author and journalist. He is best known as a co-presenter, alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, of the motoring programme Top Gear from 2003 until 2015 and the television series The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime Video from 2016 to 2024. He also served as a director of the production company W. Chump & Sons. May has presented other programmes on themes including travel, science and technology, toys, wine culture, and the plight of manliness in modern times. He wrote a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph's motoring section from 2003 to 2011.
James Daniel May was born in Bristol, the son of aluminium factory manager James May and his wife Kathleen. He was one of four children; he has two sisters and a brother. May attended Caerleon Endowed School in Newport, Wales. He spent his teenage years in South Yorkshire, where he attended Oakwood Comprehensive School and was a choirboy at Whiston Parish Church. May studied music at Pendle College, Lancaster University, where he learned to play the flute and piano; he also spent a year studying metalwork at a technical college. After graduating, May briefly worked in a number of jobs including for a car dealer, at a jewellery shop, in a pub, at a hospital in Chelsea as a records officer and had a short stint in the civil service. He then took up journalism and broadcasting in his thirties. He also held a part-time job as a moulder at the foundry his father was employed at and suggested in a 2017 interview with The Times that this formed his interest in mechanics.
In 1989, May began working as a sub-editor for The Engineer and later for Autocar magazine in the early 1990s, from which he was dismissed for performing a prank. He subsequently wrote car review columns for Scotland on Sunday and Country Life and revealed in a 2025 interview with The Times that he was also sacked from those two positions. He has since written for several publications, including the regular column England Made Me in Car Magazine, articles for Top Gear magazine, and a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph. He has written the book May on Motors (2006), which is a collection of his published articles, and co-authored Oz and James's Big Wine Adventure (2006), based on the TV series of the same name. He wrote the afterword to Long Lane with Turnings, published in September 2006, the final book by motoring writer L. J. K. Setright. In the same month, he co-presented a tribute to Raymond Baxter. Notes From The Hard Shoulder and James May's 20th Century, a book to accompany the television series of the same name, were published in 2007.
In an interview with Richard Allinson on BBC Radio 2, May confessed that in 1992 he was dismissed from Autocar magazine after putting together an acrostic in one issue. At the end of the year, the magazine's "Road Test Yearbook" supplement was published. Each spread featured four reviews and each review started with a large red letter (known in typography as an initial or a drop cap). May's role was to put the entire supplement together. To alleviate the tedium, May wrote each review such that the initials on the first four spreads read "ROAD", "TEST", "YEAR" and "BOOK". Subsequent spreads seemingly had random letters, starting with "SOYO" and "UTHI"; when punctuated, these letters spelt out the message: "So you think it's really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up; it's a real pain in the arse." In a 2019 interview with Carscoops.com, May stated that while the hidden message originally passed through the magazine's pre-printing review processes unnoticed, he was found out when readers began calling in to Autocar's offices, thinking there might be a prize involved. Upon learning of this, the magazine's management called for May to be fired.
His past television credits include presenting Driven on Channel 4 in 1998, narrating an eight-part BBC One series called Road Rage School, and co-hosting the ITV1 coverage of the 2006 London Boat Show. He also wrote and presented a Christmas special called James May's Top Toys (for BBC One). James May: My Sisters' Top Toys attempted to investigate the gender divide of toy appeal. In series 3, episode 3 of Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, May managed to beat Ramsay in eating bull penis and rotten shark and with his fish pie recipe.
May was briefly a co-presenter of the original Top Gear series in 1999. During an interview in 2020, Jeremy Clarkson claimed that the show's original producers had decided to replace him with May in 1999, though they felt dissatisfied with May as he was soon fired in 2000, shortly before the entire programme was cancelled the following year. In 2002, May auditioned for the new version of Top Gear but was initially rejected by BBC executives who felt that his background was too similar to Clarkson and Hammond's and had limited appeal. Following the first season of Top Gear's relaunch, Clarkson managed to convince the show's producer Andy Wilman in 2003 to rehire May as Jason Dawe's replacement. By May's admission in 2025, he and Clarkson had met during the launch of a new Audi A4 convertible in France and after disagreeing on the car, Clarkson had thought the bickering between them would work on the programme. May first co-presented the revived series of Top Gear in its second series in 2003, where he earned the nickname "Captain Slow" owing to his careful driving style, and his OCD-like obsessions with order. Despite this sobriquet, he has done some especially high-speed driving – in the 2007 series, he took a Bugatti Veyron to its top speed of 253 mph (407 km/h), then in 2010 he achieved 259.11 mph (417 km/h) in the Veyron's newer 16.4 Super Sport edition. In an earlier episode he also tested the original version of the Bugatti Veyron against the Pagani Zonda F. May, along with co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson and an Icelandic support crew, travelled by car to the magnetic North Pole in 2007, using a modified Toyota Hilux. In the words of Clarkson, May was the first person to go there "who didn't want to be there". He later drove the same Hilux with new modifications up the side of the erupting volcano Eyjafjallajökull. Following the BBC's decision not to renew Jeremy Clarkson's contract with the show on 25 March 2015, May stated in April 2015 that he would not continue to present Top Gear as part of a new line-up of presenters.
