If you’re like me, you’ve probably wondered for ages who was behind all of the wacky creations we saw on “Top Gear.” Sure, there were plenty of scenes showing Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond “building” their cars, but we all knew that was all just a bit of television trickery. Well, as it turns out, a lot of the wonderful and wild creations we saw on TV were actually made by the Rosses — an unassuming British couple doing the work out of a shed in their yard.
You see, Peter and Sarah Ross are the founders, owners and operators of Television Vehicles — a fabrication and facilitation company that specializes in the exact sort of wheeled lunacy “Top Gear“ excelled in during its heyday. They were sort of a do-it-all company that helped TGTV bring magic to the screen, as Top Gear Magazine explains:
Need a stunt car building double quick? Need a hero car fixing overnight after a presenter got a little too ambitious in the name of ‘getting the shot’? Need to source three used classics for a gag at a moment’s notice and have them transported halfway across the world? That’s all in a day’s work for the Rosses.
“I suppose I’d say I’m an engineer,” Peter tells me. “On a TV show, especially on the travel specials, it’s all hands on deck. A lot of the time I’d been driving. Sometimes presenters would just do their piece to camera and then you’d have a wig, you’d put his shirt on and just do the donkey work. Sometimes in the background we would have the ‘penance’ car. If you are a very naughty boy – or if you break something and I can’t fix it – you are going to end up in the Allegro or the Marina, that sort of thing. And I’d be driving that.”
In essence, the Rosses would make it happen. Peter’s role would begin long before shooting did. Basically, he says he’d fly to whatever country they were filming in, unload the cars, do the paperwork and figure out fueling needs for the shoot. Before any of that happened, though, Peter and Sarah probably built and modified the cars themselves in their garage.
Split responsibilities
Like any good partnership, the duo split their responsibilities. While Peter was working on wild things like building “a release mechanism to drop a Beetle from a helicopter a mile above a South African salt flat” and creating “a grid of double decker banger racers steered from the top car,” Sarah was more concentrated on logistics. Her job was to work out how to “transport the TG circus around the world.” She explained one of her weirder interactions to Top Gear Mag:
She mimes putting a phone to her ear. “The producers rang up saying ‘We’re struggling to get the SsangYacht to Monaco’. I said ‘It’s no problem, we’ll build a truck in the workshop’. I put the phone down, went down to Peter and said, ‘You’ve got a to build a truck to take a SsangYong that’s been converted into a yacht to Monte Carlo.’ He dropped everything – and we did it.” And the world’s fastest tractor. And Mr Nippy, the certified fastest ice cream van. Freddie’s bungee jump Metro? Built by Peter himself.
Some wild creations
It’s hard to say exactly how many different cars the Rosses worked on with “Top Gear,” but based on this story alone, they had their hands involved in the Audi A8 and Jaguar XJS train-car things, the police cars, the diesel Jaguar that drove around the Nürburgring, the P45, the exploding Fiat Multipla and — of course — the Star in a Reasonbly Priced Car Chevy Lacetti. I’m sure there are countless others as well.
It remains incredibly impressive to me what the British can pull off in a small shed in Surrey. It’s hard to say what Top Gear would have been without the Rosses, but I’m positive that it would have been much different, and it wouldn’t have been nearly the show we look back on so fondly today.
