Fantastic! Nothing prepares you for this – what a start to my trucking career!" Richard Hammond is having a good day. It’s his first time behind the wheel of a truck – in this case a flagship 580hp R-series Topline tractor unit – and he’s clearly enjoying it: “It is just brilliant. I love it – and so will you!” he gestures to an unseen audience via the camera filming his every move. “This is everything I hoped for and more.”

Coming from a man who claims to have driven virtually every motor vehicle going – fast ones, big ones and ones that can only be described as plain daft – that’s quite a complement indeed. In fact, from dawn to dusk as the cameras whir and the movie slowly takes shape, Richard Hammond’s enthusiasm for the R-series never falters. “I’m just sitting here feeling good about the world,” he remarks at one point late in the day. “What I want to do now is head off to the Continent!”

For the film-shoot, Richard had travelled to the Bruntingthorpe test track in Leicestershire, one of his regular testing stomping grounds. The idea was for him to present the features and benefits of the new R-series and then, with a little help and tuition from Scania’s driver training team, go on to drive one for himself and give his personal assessment of the experience. But what no one had anticipated was the extent to which he would warm to the task.

“Like every child I always loved trucks…and I guess it’s just gone on from there,” he says. “But what I like today even more is a vehicle that’s fit for purpose, which is exactly what I have here. I’m a great believer in doing things properly – I think the first car everyone should drive is a Ferrari, so the first truck I drive had to be a 16-litre Scania R-series!” OK, so that’s a little tongue in cheek but, then again, what else would you expect from a motoring correspondent?

Richard Hammond hails from Birmingham, but has long since gone West and today lives in a rural idyll near the Welsh border. “It’s just me, my wife, our two daughters, a selection of cars and motorbikes, four dogs, four cats a rabbit, a chicken and a pregnant horse!” he says. “But it wasn’t always like that – my life, that is, not the horse!

“I started off by going to Art College in Harrogate, from where I came away with a BTEC in Communications, Photography and Video. Then I got a job as a presenter for Radio York. I subsequently worked for radio stations in Cumbria, Leeds and Newcastle, living in a series of miserable bedsits and becoming a sort of Alan Partridge of the North. Any spare cash I managed to acquire went on feeding my passion – cars and bikes.

“Later on I moved into PR for a French car maker for a spell, but in truth my aim there was to get to meet the editors of motoring programmes because what I really wanted was to break into TV!

“Eventually I was offered the opportunity to work one day a week on Motorweek, a motoring show on the Men & Motors satellite channel. This, I thought, was my big chance. So I resigned on the Friday and then spent the weekend fretting about it; after all, by then I had commitments like a mortgage to consider. Come Monday, I retracted my resignation – but by the following week I’d changed my mind again and handed in the keys to my company car.