Former Top Gear presenter Tiff Needell has said that Chris Evans’s new version of the motoring show would not be as successful as Jeremy Clarkson’s.

Needell, who co-presented Top Gear from 1987 until it was cancelled in 2001 (before being revived in 2002), said that the new-look show would not hit figures of 6 million viewers that made its predecessor one of the BBC’s most popular shows.

“Top Gear won’t sustain the same audience as the old Top Gear,” he said, speaking on a panel at Advertising Week Europe on Wednesday. “It will be like [BBC’s] The One Show on wheels, all bubbly jubbly … they won’t get the same numbers.”

He said he felt the Chris Evans version, which included a number of co-hosts including Friends star Matt LeBlanc and former F1 team owner and presenter Eddie Jordan, would not have the same broad appeal as the “three egos” - Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. “The whole thing the three egos did was manage to get the family watching,” he said. “It was for the family, kids loved it, they appealed to everyone.”