Meet the power couple behind some of Top Gear telly's best-loved stunts

The Rosses have an idyllic garden. Birdsong intertwines with a gentle blub-blub from the water feature. Bees flit across the dahlias. Across the paddock, behind the hedgerow lie three Renault 11s split clean in half. Railway wheels to fit an Audi A8. And next to a faded blue Chevy Lacetti equipped with a roll cage, there’s something that looks suspiciously like a Boudica chariot spike.

Peter Ross catches me eying his homemade medieval weapon outside the workshop concealed at the bottom of his garden. “Yes, that’s off Jeremy’s police car,” he nods. First episode of Series 11, to save you looking. He then hands me an oversized digital stopwatch. It looks strangely familiar. “Is this...?”

“The stopwatch JC used to time his lap of the Nürburgring in a diesel Jag... yep,” he finishes.

Photography: Tom Barnes

So, how did Peter and his wife Sarah come to have a smattering of Top Gear props lying about in their backyard? Well, this is where many of them came into being. The Rosses are the founder-owner-operators of Television Vehicles – your go-to fabricators and facilitators of wheeled chaos on television. Need a stunt car building double quick? Need a hero car fixing overnight after a presenter got a little too ambitious in the name of ‘getting the shot’? Need to source three used classics for a gag at a moment’s notice and have them transported halfway across the world? That’s all in a day’s work for the Rosses.

“I suppose I’d say I’m an engineer,” Peter tells me. “On a TV show, especially on the travel specials, it’s all hands on deck. A lot of the time I’d been driving. Sometimes presenters would just do their piece to camera and then you’d have a wig, you’d put his shirt on and just do the donkey work. Sometimes in the background we would have the ‘penance’ car. If you are a very naughty boy – or if you break something and I can’t fix it – you are going to end up in the Allegro or the Marina, that sort of thing. And I’d be driving that.”

Countless legendary moments simply wouldn’t have happened without Peter’s talent and Sarah's organisation

But Peter’s role began long before the cameras were rolling. “We would fly into the country beforehand, sort unloading the cars, off the boat, off the plane, doing the carnet paperwork... then working out fuel. Do we need octane booster in it? Do we have to get aviation gas from the local airport to run the cars on? Anything from basic transport and technical assistance through pro driving to designing and building the cars on an idea from production – that was us.”

While Peter was busy with a to-do list as diverse as ‘build a release mechanism to drop a Beetle from a helicopter a mile above a South African salt flat’ and ‘create a grid of double decker banger racers steered from the top car’, Sarah concentrated on logistics, borne from a previous career in the airline industry, working out how to transport the TG circus around the world. “Some of the calls I used to take...” she says with a wry smile.

She mimes putting a phone to her ear. “The producers rang up saying ‘We’re struggling to get the SsangYacht to Monaco’. I said ‘It’s no problem, we’ll build a truck in the workshop’. I put the phone down, went down to Peter and said, ‘You’ve got a to build a truck to take a SsangYong that’s been converted into a yacht to Monte Carlo.’ He dropped everything – and we did it.” And the world’s fastest tractor. And Mr Nippy, the certified fastest ice cream van. Freddie’s bungee jump Metro? Built by Peter himself.

I don’t want to puncture anyone’s love for what’s known in the trade as the ‘magic of television’, but countless legendary moments from the Top Gear canon simply wouldn’t have happened without Peter’s talent with a welder and Sarah’s never say die organisation. The TGV12 train with caravan carriage? The P45 world’s smallest car? The OAP friendly Fiat Multipla with exploding bodywork? All of that came to life in this sleepy Surrey garden.

Actually, it’s not sleepy. “The pensioner proof ‘Oldsmobile’ needed pyrotechnic wheels so they could fall off if it was driven the wrong way onto a motorway,” Peter recalls. “We were testing the explosives out here. A wheel blew off, bounced over the hedge and flew into next door’s newly renovated swimming pool.” Try explaining that one on your house insurance.

But motoring mayhem is in Peter’s blood. “I’ve always been into engineering. The madder, the better. My first job was in my father’s garage in Guildford, and I worked in all these different garages, across different marques, learning welding, bodywork, engines, you name it. I was also building and racing my own V8 stock cars. As soon as I started working for Top Gear, it all added up. It was as though I’d been serving the perfect apprenticeship all my life.”