DriveTribe, the Richard Hammond Automotive Media Startup, Explained

What DriveTribe was built to be

DriveTribe was announced in April 2016, after several months in stealth mode, as a digital hub for people who love cars, motorcycles and the open road. It was founded by the Top Gear trio — Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May — together with former Top Gear producer Andy Wilman and serial entrepreneur Ernesto Schmitt, who had recently exited another company called Beamly and took on the role of chief executive. The launch was timed to promote the trio’s move to The Grand Tour, their new motoring show for Amazon, which arrived later that same year — see the full TV career record for where that reunion sits in his broadcasting career.

The platform organised content and community into themed “Tribes” rather than a single generic feed, mixing original video with reader-submitted posts, news, reviews and motoring quizzes. By 2021 the company reported scaling to more than 140 million monthly platform users, alongside a companion site, FoodTribe, run under the same business.

Funding and growth

Early money came directly from Clarkson, Hammond and May themselves, before two outside rounds landed close together ahead of launch: $5.5 million from the venture-capital investors Jim Breyer — an early Facebook backer — and Atomico, the fund run by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström, followed roughly three weeks later by $6.5 million from 21st Century Fox. Together that put the startup’s total funding at around $12 million. At its height DriveTribe became one of the larger automotive social channels online, reporting more than 10 million followers across platforms and over 10 million monthly views on its video content.

Closure in 2022

DriveTribe ran for just over five years before shutting down at the end of January 2022, citing industry pressure through the Covid-19 pandemic and a global semiconductor shortage that squeezed car-makers’ marketing budgets — DriveTribe’s core source of advertising revenue. Both the DriveTribe website and its companion app closed as part of the same shutdown, alongside FoodTribe, the food-focused site run under the same business. Clarkson said in a statement that he was “disappointed that challenges in the industry — not in the least helped by the ongoing pandemic — have simply made it impossible to continue with the business in its current form.” Hammond struck a similar note, saying the team was “really disappointed that the DriveTribe website business has to come to an end,” while pointing fans toward the trio’s social-media channels to keep the community going without the site itself.

DriveTribe today

DriveTribe is no longer operating. Its 2022 closure means it now sits as a completed chapter in Hammond’s career rather than an ongoing venture — a separate one, either way, from his television work (see the full TV career record) and from his restoration business, The Smallest Cog.

For a domain built entirely around Hammond’s career, DriveTribe is a useful reminder that not every venture he has taken on runs alongside his TV work indefinitely — some, like this one, run their course and close, and the record here is kept as it actually happened rather than updated to look tidier in hindsight.