Clarkson, Hammond and May Friendship Built on Loathing Tension

In keeping with their massive ambitions of not only launching a brand new, multi-million dollar, show for Amazon, they have also launched the social media site, DriveTribe, and been on a international media tour.

The boys recently met up with Joe’s Rich Cooper for an interview to promote their newest project in London’s King’s Cross and talked about the difficulties with launching the website and associated app, their friendship, and of course The Grand Tour.

It seems that the launch of DriveTribe has gone fairly smoothly, due largely in fact to the slow, gradual rollout, but that doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been any hiccups.

Rich asked the boys about the trouble they had with the notoriously tricky Apple App Store with Jeremy blaming James for the troubles, saying, “He’s the most tech savvy out of the three of us, which is why the app is four hours late,” he says, miming an impression of a fuddy-duddy James May at a keyboard, murmuring technical bletherings to himself. James isn’t going to stand for that. “I’m higher up the technical pecking order than he is,” he responds. “But then so are most animals.”

When asked about their friendship, the boys gave some great responses. James said “I don’t think the three of us would be mates if we were all at Sixth Form or university,” James notes. “There’s camaraderie, but it is creatively fueled by a little nugget of loathing. People always go on about ‘magic chemistry’. They think it’s a buddy movie – it’s conflict.” He pauses. “We’ll call it ‘creative tension’.

It seems that there must have been a lot of this “creative tension” as James elaborated on the past few months and the time they’ve been spending together saying, “There probably hasn’t been a day at all when I haven’t communicated with them in some way. It’s horrific, bearing in mind we don’t even like each other.” It’s like they say, you can always be meanest to your best friends.

Going back to their newest venture, Hammond talked about why they decided to go ahead with the project saying “It’s one of the reasons that we three are uniquely positioned to do it,” says Hammond. “In our shows in the past we enjoyed a particularly broad audience, across the ages, sexes, demographics. That kind of happened naturally and we wanted to protect it going into The Grand Tour, and I hope this has the same vibe.”

James added to this, saying “This is everything for people who are into one tiny aspect of cars, but this is also a place where you can go and laugh at cars,” adds James. ” Or even if you don’t like cars; you could have an ‘I Hate Cars’ tribe, and why not? I’ll contribute to that. It’s a healthy debate.”

Between The Grand Tour, DriveTrive, and whatever else the three amigos decide to get themselves into next, I’m sure it’s going to be great. The show has been recieving fantastic ratings across the world, and their app for DriveTribe has reached number one in the app store. If that’s what having a couple great frenemies gets you, sign me up!

For the rest of the interview, check out the rest of the interview over at Joe!

Source: Joe.Co.Uk