Richard Hammond

It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an effective means of saving fuel, to be quite honest.

My first car was a 1976 Toyota Corolla Liftback in red, like the one in 'The Blues Brothers.' I painted a Union Jack on the roof. I was absolutely in love with it until I destroyed it, which broke my heart!

And I think that still is true of this business - which is basically research and development - that you probably spend more time in planning and training and designing for things to go wrong, and how you cope with them, than you do for things to go right.

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.