Richard Hammond at CarFest, the Chris Evans Charity Festival

A family festival built to raise money for charity

CarFest is an annual family music-and-motoring festival founded in 2012 by broadcaster Chris Evans. It has since become one of the UK’s largest family fundraising events, combining live music, celebrity appearances and motoring displays. The stated purpose is raising money for children’s charities, principally BBC Children in Need. Since its first edition, the festival has raised more than £28 million for those causes.

Fronting the live track shows

Richard Hammond has been a regular presence at CarFest for years, fronting the live track displays and stunt shows that anchor the festival’s motoring side. It is not a brief celebrity walk-on. His involvement runs to the actual content of the show, presenting themed displays that range across different eras of motoring, from American muscle cars to historic rally machinery.

Bringing his own collection to the festival

Hammond’s CarFest appearances have doubled as a public airing for part of his own car collection. Vehicles from The Smallest Cog’s workshop and his personal garage have appeared at the festival, including Oliver, the 1963 Opel Kadett he brought home from the 2007 Botswana special. It is a direct link between a car bought for a television challenge nearly two decades ago and a charity event he still fronts today. Recent editions have also featured his rebuilt 1970s Buick Riviera, kept from The Grand Tour’s Scotland special “Lochdown”; a rally-prepared Subaru Impreza WRX STI he calls Martin; and a Ford Capri GXL from his personal garage.

A festival that grew into two, then merged into one

CarFest South has run at Laverstoke Park Farm in Hampshire every year since the festival’s 2012 launch. A sister event, CarFest North, ran alongside it for a decade at a rotating set of venues across Cheshire: Cholmondeley Castle, then Oulton Park from 2013 to 2015, then the Bolesworth Estate through to 2022, its final year at that site. Since then the festival has consolidated toward a single main annual event rather than running two simultaneous sites. That structure carried through to the move to Silverstone.

A family affair in recent years

More recent editions have widened the family connection further. Hammond has appeared alongside his daughter Izzy, who has built a public profile of her own in recent years, sharing driving and track-display duties as part of the same live shows. CarFest relocated to Silverstone Circuit in Northamptonshire for its 2026 edition, its latest venue change since the original Hampshire and Cheshire sites. Across its history the festival has welcomed close to 1.2 million attendees and several hundred performers, alongside the motoring displays Hammond himself fronts.

Part of the same public-facing pattern

Like his Vice-President role at The Children’s Trust, Hammond’s CarFest appearances are charitable rather than a paid promotional slot. Both sit alongside a broadcasting career that, on its own, would not require this much time spent at public events. Taken together, the two pages describe a presenter who keeps a real, recurring public-appearance schedule well outside the television and streaming credits covered on the main TV career record.