Richard Hammond's Car and Motorcycle Collection, Explained

A collector before he was a presenter

Richard Hammond has been buying, restoring and riding classic vehicles for most of his adult life. Most of it predates the television work entirely. The collection sits alongside his broadcasting career rather than growing out of it, and several pieces in it now double as working stock for his restoration business, The Smallest Cog.

Oliver, the car that came home from Botswana

The best-known car in the collection has a specific origin story. During the 2007 Top Gear Botswana special, Hammond bought a battered 1963 Opel Kadett for the show’s budget-car challenge and nicknamed it Oliver. Most cars bought for that kind of segment get scrapped or sold once filming wraps. Oliver didn’t. Hammond shipped it back to the UK, restored it properly, and has kept it in his personal collection ever since. It still turns up occasionally at public appearances such as CarFest.

The rest of the car collection

Beyond Oliver, Hammond’s garage has included a 1962 Jaguar E-Type roadster, a 1968 Ford Mustang GT390 and a 1972 MGB GT. Later additions lean more daily-driver, among them a Jaguar XJR and a Porsche 911 Turbo S. Not every purchase stayed. He has named a Ferrari 550 Maranello as the one sale he genuinely regrets, and a 1959 Bentley S2 and an Aston Martin DBS Volante have both passed through the collection and been sold on in turn.

A motorcycle collection bigger than the car one

Hammond has said more than once that motorcycles, not cars, are where his real enthusiasm sits. He has owned hundreds of them across three decades of riding. The collection runs from pre-war machines — a 1925 Sunbeam and a 1932 Velocette KSS among them — through 1970s classics like a Kawasaki Z900 and a BMW R90S, up to a Norton Commando 961 bought new for his 50th birthday. A couple of bikes carry their own small story: a Kawasaki Z900 Mindy gave him for his 40th birthday, and a 1977 Moto Guzzi Le Mans, were both sold on in 2021.

The 2022 sale that helped fund the workshop

In 2022, Hammond consigned eight cars and motorcycles from his own collection to The Classic Sale at Silverstone, an established annual auction for enthusiast vehicles. The proceeds went toward his new venture, The Smallest Cog. One detail gets repeated often: he sold his own Porsche 911T in part to help fund a proper dust-collection booth for the workshop’s paint bay. It is a rare case of a presenter’s personal collection directly bankrolling the business seen on screen, rather than the other way around.

Restoration projects, not just finished cars

Not everything in the collection is roadworthy. Hammond has kept several genuine restoration projects on the go alongside the finished cars, including a 1929 Ford Model A and a 1956 Land Rover Series 1, both still awaiting full rebuilds. Neither sits as a static garage piece. That mix of usable classics, restoration projects and the occasional custom build, such as a Bowler-modified Land Rover Defender, is closer to how The Smallest Cog itself operates than a conventional celebrity car collection. He keeps them as much for the work involved as for the finished result.