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Jeremy Clarkson 'choked' after final ever lap of Top Gear track

The axed TV host was locked out of the offices to stop him taking a souvenir

Jess Denham
Monday 20 July 2015 09:07 BST
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Jeremy Clarkson was axed from Top Gear after a 'fracas' with a producer
Jeremy Clarkson was axed from Top Gear after a 'fracas' with a producer (Getty Images)

Jeremy Clarkson has spoken about just how emotional he felt taking his last lap of the Top Gear track.

The axed TV host was allowed back for one “last hurrah” in the name of charity last week, but the BBC made sure that no further liberties would be taken.

“I was feeling a bit choked as I went through the gates for the very last time,” Clarkson said after driving a new Ferrari 488 GTB at the event, which raised £100,000 for the Camden Roundhouse.

“The Top Gear portable office was locked to stop me taking even a small souvenir. The hangar was empty.”

Despite the inevitable pangs Clarkson feels for his old job, which he lost in March after a “fracas” with producer Oisin Tymon led BBC director general Tony Hall to decide that “a line had been crossed”, the 55-year-old presenter is “full of memories” from the hit motoring series.

“The missing lamp where Black Stig went off in Aston Martin Vanguish. The tyre wall rendered cockeyed by the first White Stig’s Koenigsegg moment, and the two furrows left by me after a quarter-of-a-mile spin in a BMW 1-series,” he remembered in a piece for The Sunday Times.

His last lap was a good one too, “a smooth one, the sort of lap that would have made the Stig proud”.

It remains to be seen where Clarkson and his former co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May will pop up next, but they are strongly rumoured to be on the brink of a Netflix or Amazon streaming deal.

The trio’s old BBC contracts reportedly prevent them from making a rival Top Gear on another UK channel for two years.

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