Clarkson’s punch. The Ferrari he couldn’t pay for. His ‘metrosexual’ floral shirts. And the VERY rude name he wanted to give his new car show. Buckle up for a rip-roaring ride with the floppy-haired posh one from Top Gear...

‘Top Gear has worked because of a combination of camaraderie and mutual dislike... Not being part of the BBC with Top Gear any more does pain me, because it’s an organisation I approve of,' said James May

James May regrets the way Top Gear ended – but not for the reasons you might think.

‘Even then it wasn’t a proper bar brawl, so we still failed at being proper blokes,’ he says of the infamous punch that finished off the classic line-up of the world’s favourite car show.

‘It should have been a lot of bottles going through windows and some sword-fighting and stuff. That would have been great. But it wasn’t. It was just all a bit...’

I wait for the pay-off as May tries to make light of what happened. Top Gear presenters always speak like this, with lashings of irony, famously leaving a pause before delivering a dramatic final word. But this time the old powers fail him and he just smiles, weakly: ‘Yeah.’

May runs a hand through his long, grey, shaggy hair and looks embarrassed, struggling for words until he says: ‘Let’s not talk about that any more.’

Oh, but we must and we will. Hundreds of millions of fans around the world were shocked in March when the Clarkson-Hammond-May Top Gear came to a sudden end.

There would be no more supercars, no more racing with fighter jets, no more Reliant Robins strapped to rockets. No more stars in reasonably priced cars, no more crazy road trips.

Jeremy Clarkson had ruined it all by punching a producer at the end of a long, hard day’s filming in the wet and cold – and all because he wasn’t going to get a hot meal.

‘We get bad-tempered when we spend far too much time together,’ admits May, who has always played the team’s calm one to the growling, grizzly Clarkson and the hyperactive Richard Hammond.

May reveals for the first time that he did actually get really worked up with Clarkson for ending the show in such a way – not least because he was left wondering how the hell he was going to pay for the Ferrari supercar he had just ordered for nearly a quarter of a million pounds.

‘I always said it was a privilege to end up on the television. It wasn’t my ambition, I fell into editing magazines and writing about cars and then I ended up on the telly,' said James

He must have been livid. ‘Well, to be honest, yes. Exactly. “You daft t*****, have you seen the size of the bill coming my way?”’

He had bought the bright-orange Ferrari on the basis of the lucrative deal the Top Gear team had been about to sign with the BBC.

‘Then it all fell apart, but by then I was sort of obliged to have it. The order books were closed but they had squeezed one more in for me, a 458 Speciale.’

This is the first time May has spoken frankly and freely about the end of Top Gear since it happened.

We have met to discuss an entirely different programme called Building Cars Live, which is why we are sitting in a corner of a grey, grim conference room at the BMW factory at Cowley, Oxford, where they make Minis.

But after a little prompting he starts spilling secrets – about the new show that he and his colleagues are making for Amazon Prime, as well as the dark days that followed Clarkson’s sacking.

Forget calling it ‘Gear Knobs’ for a start, despite widespread reports that it’s been registered as a trademark.

‘I don’t think we can actually call it that,’ he says with a grin. ‘That’s not possible. It was actually my idea. I think it’s funny, but I don’t think it’s appropriate. We haven’t got a name for it yet. We honestly haven’t.’

I believe him. James May always comes across as sincere, whether he’s trying to make a motorcycle out of Meccano in his show Toy Stories or trashing a Trabant in Cars Of The People.

His shoes and jeans are smart, his hair is cut a little shorter these days but his floral shirt is left untucked and he looks and sounds like a very clever but happily bemused schoolboy.

The former Top Gear trio have had to put together an office and production team from scratch, now that they do not have the power of the BBC behind them.

‘We haven’t done very much.’

How much is he getting for this? Reports have suggested that Clarkson is on £10 million and the other two £7 million.

‘People keep saying, “James has been out and bought an orange Ferrari because of the £7 million he’s being given by Amazon.” That’s not happening. I haven’t been paid anything by Amazon yet and it isn’t that much.’

How much will he get then?

‘Hundreds of pounds a day. While I’m working, not all year, obviously.’

What does that mean?

‘I don’t know because I haven’t been paid yet. It depends how much we are going to spend on making the show. We are going to spend a lot.’

‘A lot of people don’t like us, but there are a lot of people who do. We owe it to them to stick together and do it for a bit longer,' said James of his former Top Gear co-presenters Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson

Fans will be disappointed to hear they are going to have to wait a long time before they see anything.

‘We’ll probably be out there in the ether early autumn – next year.’

Is he not worried that people will have forgotten about him and his mates if they are beaten to the airwaves by Chris Evans and his new Top Gear team?

‘The audience forget very quickly, but they can be reminded again as well.’

He doesn’t sound worried.

‘The result is quite good. You get a reinvented Top Gear with Chris Evans, who will rethink it quite vigorously – maybe it could have done with a rethink anyway – and you also get us three, who an established number of people like.’

Some were glad to see the back of Top Gear, accusing Clarkson in particular of being a sexist and a racist. The audience was 40 per cent female, but the jokes about Albanians, Burmese, Mexicans and others were a bit hard to take at times.

‘A lot of people don’t like us, but there are a lot of people who do. We owe it to them to stick together and do it for a bit longer.’

Surprisingly, in March he really did feel that chance had gone.

Top Gear as he knew and loved it ended on the day the director-general of the BBC, Tony Hall, said Jeremy Clarkson’s contract would not be renewed because he had ‘crossed a line’ with ‘a physical altercation accompanied by sustained and prolonged verbal abuse of an extreme nature’.

May thought his television career was ending then, too.

‘I always said it was a privilege to end up on the television. It wasn’t my ambition, I fell into editing magazines and writing about cars and then I ended up on the telly.’

He joined the original, tame Top Gear back in 1999 but his career really took off when Clarkson and the executive producer Andy Wilman totally revamped it in 2002, putting the emphasis as much on humour and great stories as on the cars.

As the world’s press camped outside his door in Hammersmith, London, May actually sat watching old episodes back to back: one from 2004 and the other from 2014, when Top Gear was a hilarious, action-packed, gas-guzzling, caravan-smashing, speed-worshipping world favourite with 350 million viewers a week. Perhaps it had peaked and they hadn’t realised, he thought.

‘I found it deeply depressing, because there were these three downy-faced boys on the early one who were just being very excited because they were allowed to drive a car.

'Then there were these three grizzled old b******* on the recent one. I thought, “Maybe we didn’t see this coming and we should have run away earlier.”’

That explains why he looked so depressed when a reporter knocked on his door in the aftermath of the sacking and asked whether he supported Clarkson.

‘In many ways no,’ he said. ‘I have said many times before, the man is a k***.’

Now he says: ‘It’s fairly well known that we all hate each other to some extent. Top Gear has worked because of a combination of camaraderie and mutual dislike. That’s actually the magic.’

Then again, he also says: ‘Not being part of the BBC with Top Gear any more does pain me, because it’s an organisation I approve of.’

So wasn’t he tempted to ditch his punch-happy chum and stay?

‘If one or two of us had stayed you’d have ended up with two diluted things which wouldn’t have worked as well,’ he says.

‘It baffles us, but us three together has obviously become an important part of people’s lives.

'We do have to serve them while there’s an appetite for a bit more of us.’

May actually returns to our screens – and the BBC – this week with the first of two 90-minute episodes of Building Cars Live.

Cameras will follow every moment in the production of a car, from the arrival of steel sheets to the moment it drives off the production line.

It’s a bit like Springwatch for automobiles (and his co-presenter is Kate Humble, who is on all those nature shows of course).

He’s choosy about his TV appearances though, and declined to go on Strictly Come Dancing.

‘I’ve got a bad back and it just wouldn’t be funny, it would be rather tragic.’

His greatest fear would be staying in the competition.

‘It’s quite a good deal if you get knocked out quickly, take the money, go on holiday and drink it off.’

May lives with the dance critic Sarah Frater, so does he like to strut his stuff?

‘I can’t dance, unless I’m really outrageously drunk. Then I quite like hardcore clubbing music and I get on the table and jump up and down. I love it, but I must look like a total a*** because I’m 52.’

He studied music at Lancaster University and is said to be a fine pianist.

‘I used to be – I haven’t done any practice. I’ve got a bad finger. I automatically get a dotted rhythm from this hand, so I’ll have to go into jazz.’

James returns to our screens – and the BBC – this week with the first of two 90-minute episodes of Building Cars Live (pictured with co-presenters Ant Anstead and Kate Humble)

The point that May is trying so hard to resist is that there is more to him than the überbloke of Top Gear.

‘Am I a metrosexual? I still don’t know what that means.’

He certainly looks metrosexual in his floral shirt, I say.

‘The shirt is pretty gay really, I imagine. Does metrosexual mean I drink beer and fart but I have an appreciation of cushions? Is that it? I must be one then.’

Hang on, you’re not allowed to say your shirt is a bit gay any more, are you?

‘No. Because that doesn’t really mean anything. Anyway, when I was a kid – and I think this is probably still true for a lot of people – the word “gay” didn’t mean homosexual. It meant... not soft... do you remember Walter the Softy in The Beano? What was he? He was slightly away with the fairies.’

This is not helping.

‘He wasn’t gay in the sense that we mean it now, he was just soft. He was soft and sensitive and a bit delicate.’

Is that what he is trying to signify with his shirt?

‘Quite possibly. I don’t know. The shirt thing just started one day when I bought one with a really interesting pattern and people laughed at it, so I thought, “I’ll keep buying daft shirts with flowers on.”’

Those shirts now define his image.

‘I can’t shake it off. But just for the record, to let your readers know, when I’m at home I often put on a really shabby old dirty T-shirt and go in my garage and take a motorcycle to bits while listening to AC/DC and drinking beer. Just to reassure myself.’

Top Gear always seemed to pride itself on looking pretty butch, but was it really dangerous when they appeared to be playing about with live ammunition, blowing things up or driving at great speed around narrow mountain roads?

‘I have never thought, “S***, this is when I am going to die.”’

Not even in Argentina, where they were attacked for turning up with a Porsche whose number plate – H982 FKL – was taken to be a reference to Britain’s victory in the Falklands War?

‘No. I feared for the crew.’

As their hotel was besieged by angry Argentinians, the three presenters slipped out the back way and took a helicopter to safety, leaving the crew behind with the cars.

‘We thought that if we just quietly disappeared it would all calm down, but we were wrong.

'The target was the three cars. The crew drove out towards Chile but they got a lot of stick and stuff thrown at them,’ he says.

‘We didn’t mean to, but I’m afraid we did drop them in it slightly. I feel a bit bad about that. But I had broken three ribs, falling off a horse, so I wouldn’t have been much good in a fight.’

He doesn’t mind a virtual fight, though. Top Gear’s more rabid fans have been trolling Chris Evans, as they did Sue Perkins before him.

‘I hated that, yes, I found that very depressing. People are saying, “This new Top Gear is going to be all political correctness and health and safety and I won’t be watching it.” How do you know?

'It might be brilliant. It might be naked dancing girls and fireworks. You just don’t know. So for God’s sake, give it a go.’

That’s very generous.

‘I genuinely can’t wait, because I know Chris a bit and he’s mad obviously, but in a constructive and driven and dynamic way.

You’ve got two new fresh car shows where there used to be one and they will be egging each other on a bit, so who loses? No one, as far as I can see.’

May is a born enthusiast about... well, most things.

‘I do fetishise cars. Not just cars, but objects. I like watches and air rifles and toy trains, but I also quite like nice cutlery, coffee-making machines. I like art. I just like stuff.’

And he grins, delighted that it didn’t all end with a punch. Put James May in front of some stuff he can play with and he’s happy, then. Put him on the telly and we all are.