Top Gear's Chris Evans, Tiff Needell, Quentin Willson and Chris Harris

In the 1990s Quentin Willson was the used-car expert on Top Gear, yet one of his campaigns changed what new cars cost. He argued that British buyers were paying artificially higher prices than people elsewhere in Europe, and he is widely credited with drawing attention to that gap, which pushed the European Commission to use block exemption rules to force list prices down.

Four British presenters took four different routes into the same job. Chris Evans came from radio, Tiff Needell from the cockpit, Willson from the showroom and the campaign trail, and Chris Harris from the road-test desk and YouTube.

Chris Evans on Top Gear

Chris Evans is the odd one out, because he was a broadcaster long before he was near a car show. Born on 1 April 1966, he began at Piccadilly Radio in Manchester in 1983, and by 1984 was a full-time member of staff, driven around the area in the station's radio car to turn up at listeners' houses. London followed: production work at BBC GLR, then presenting from early 1990, and in September 1992 The Big Breakfast on Channel 4, which he co-hosted with Gaby Roslin until September 1994.

After that he built a company. Ginger Productions made Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, whose format sold to broadcasters abroad, and Evans took the Radio 1 Breakfast Show in April 1995, with a contract clause that let him keep making television. TFI Friday started in 1996, and by 2000 the Sunday Times Rich List had him as the highest-paid entertainer in the UK. Along the way he left Radio 1, bought Virgin Radio for 85 million pounds through Ginger Media Group in December 1997, was dismissed from it in 2001, and in 2003 lost a High Court case in which he had claimed unfair dismissal. The judge found it had been fair.

A second act began at BBC Radio 2 in 2005. He took over Drivetime in April 2006, moved to the weekday Breakfast Show in 2010 and presented The One Show on Fridays between 2010 and 2015. In the tax year to April 2017 he was the BBC's highest-paid presenter, on just under 2.25 million pounds.

The car show came in the middle of that run. In 2015 Evans signed a three-year deal to lead a new Top Gear line-up and revived TFI Friday at the same time. On 4 July 2016 he announced that he would step down as a Top Gear presenter. His departure opened the way for Chris Harris, who moved from recurring presenter to main presenter.

Quentin Willson is widely credited with prompting the European Commission to cut UK list prices for new cars.

Tiff Needell, from Ensign to Top Gear and Fifth Gear

Tiff Needell, born on 29 October 1951, is the presenter who actually raced. He took an honours degree in civil engineering at City University London and worked as a structural design engineer at George Wimpey. As a teenager he had delivered Christmas post in 1967, and one of his deliveries went to Bruce McLaren's house. He first raced at a Brands Hatch driving school in 1970.

The climb was classic British club racing. A Lotus 69 FF won in an Autosport competition gave him a start in Formula Ford. He sold it to buy an Elden Mk10, then won the Kent Messenger FF Championship in a Crossle 25F after contesting only half of the remaining season. A part-paid Formula Ford 2000 drive in a Hawke from McKinstry Racing followed, in which he dominated, and then Formula 3. Through the rest of the 1970s he was a front-runner in British F3 and the Aurora British Formula One championship.

Formula One itself was brief. In 1980 he drove two Grands Prix for Ensign. He qualified for the Belgian Grand Prix at Zolder but retired with an engine problem, and then failed to qualify at Monaco. Endurance racing treated him better. He made his Le Mans debut in 1981 in an Ibec-Hesketh 308LM, finished 17th in a Porsche 956 two years later, briefly led in 1985 in an Aston Martin EMKA C84/1 and finished 11th, and took third overall in 1990 in a Porsche 962C with David Sears and Anthony Reid. Later years brought a Jaguar XJ220 at Le Mans, five seasons in the Lister Storm and a perfect run of three British GT wins for Lister in 2000.

On screen he was a founder-member of the modern motoring programme. Needell co-hosted the original run of Top Gear from 1987. When the BBC cancelled it in 2001, he and the entire cast moved to Channel 5 and made Fifth Gear. He later co-presented MPH at Earls Court with Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond, and in 2006 with Clarkson and James May while Hammond recovered from his rocket-car crash.

He returned to Top Gear in odd ways. In 2011 he secretly drove an Ariel Atom V8 in a race against a BMW S1000RR, with May supposedly at the wheel. Late in the production of the current format he came back after nine years away to coach the director Danny Boyle for his lap in the Reasonably Priced Car segment, and Clarkson introduced him as the Emergency Stig.

One drive stands apart. On 7 February 1999 Needell drove a McLaren F1 XP5 prototype around the 3.2 km (2-mile) banked circuit at Millbrook Proving Ground in Bedfordshire, setting a fastest-lap record with an average of 314.3 km/h (195.3 mph) and a maximum of 323.2 km/h (200.8 mph).

Quentin Willson and the used-car beat

Quentin Willson, born on 23 July 1957 in Leicester with a twin brother, Ashley, arrived with a different brief. His father was a linguist who had been a code breaker at Bletchley Park. Willson joined the BBC in 1991 to co-host the original Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson, and until the format's cancellation in 2001 he appeared every week, normally as the used-car expert.

His television career ran well beyond that. The Car's the Star began in September 1994 and lasted six series. In 1999 he fronted a property series, All The Right Moves, on BBC2. After the BBC cancelled Top Gear he moved to Channel 5 to present Fifth Gear in 2002, staying until 2005. He also appeared as a presenter on Britain's Worst Driver, and returned to Channel 5 in February 2015 to host The Classic Car Show. On a lighter note, he entered the second series of Strictly Come Dancing in 2004 and was voted off after one dance, with the lowest score the show had ever recorded.

Breakfast television used him for practical motoring advice: snow driving on BBC Breakfast on 12 January 2009 and again on 4 December 2010, and the Highway Code on 5 April 2012.

The campaigns made the difference. In the 1990s, in print and on television, he highlighted the higher price of new cars in Britain compared with Europe, and was widely credited with prompting the European Commission to act. From early 2011 until 2021 he was the national spokesman for FairFuelUK, which campaigned for lower fuel duty. From March 2011, the campaign says, he and the team pressured the government into deferring 11p of duty rises, which cut the overall tax take by 5.5 billion pounds. In September 2021 he resigned, saying he was unhappy with the lobby group's direction and its lack of environmental sensibilities.

On paper he was prolific. Willson won Motoring Writer of the Year in 2004, wrote for the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror for 15 years, contributed to Classic Cars magazine and wrote ten books, from the Top Gear Good Car Guide of 1993 to Ultimate Sports Car in 2002. He consulted for BP, BSI Group and Castrol between 2008 and 2010. He died on 8 November 2025, aged 68, after a diagnosis of lung cancer.

Chris Harris on Top Gear

Chris Harris, born on 20 January 1975, started in the magazine trade. At Autocar he began, by his own telling, by cleaning ashtrays, rose to road-test editor and picked up the nickname Monkey from a character in Only Fools and Horses. In 2008 he left to co-found the web platform Drivers Republic, which closed within a year. He joined Evo, publishing his first article there on 12 October 2009, and began writing for Jalopnik on 6 November 2014.

Video made him famous. Starting in early 2012, he made a weekly review series with the /DRIVE network; 104 videos gathered over 3,500,000 views in two years. He left in 2014 and in October that year launched his own YouTube channel, Chris Harris on Cars, with the cameraman and editor Neil Carey. The channel has more than 639,000 subscribers and over 75,000,000 views. On 28 June 2016 the web series moved to the official Top Gear website, and a month later it launched on BBC America.

He joined the new Top Gear cast in February 2016 as a recurring presenter, and was promoted to main presenter after Chris Evans resigned. From the twenty-fourth series he presented alongside Matt LeBlanc and Rory Reid, and as of the twenty-seventh series with Freddie Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness. He was one of the three main presenters from 2017 to 2022.

Harris is also a genuine racer. He won his first race in a Formula Palmer Audi in 2000, has driven machines as varied as a Porsche 911 Cup, an Aston Martin Vantage GT12, a Van Diemen FF1600, a Rover SD1 and a Jaguar E-Type, and started the 24 Hours Nurburgring in 2010 and 2015. In 2016 he joined the Glickenhaus team, though their car crashed in practice. His videos often teach race technique and stress safety, particularly when demonstrating drifting.

Most of the cars he drives on camera are loans from manufacturers, which hope a good review will lift sales. He has owned exotic cars such as a Ferrari FF, but he has received press cars for as long as six months, including an Audi RS 6. His channel is funded by sponsorship and advertising, with occasional sponsored videos from brands such as Pirelli.

Four Top Gear presenters side by side

What are Needell and Harris doing now?

Needell's Lovecars work began in 2018 with the co-host Paul Woodman, and the 2020 series Lovecars: On The Road sent them across Europe to try no fewer than 50 cars. In early 2024 it was announced that a second series would be broadcast on Amazon Prime. Starting in 2025 he also became an occasional presenter on Richard Hammond's YouTube channel, usually reviewing new cars. Harris continues to run Chris Harris on Cars, which supports both him and Carey.