The controversial H982 FKL number plate on Jeremy Clarkson's Porsche during a Top Gear shoot in Argentina sparked a violent, life-threatening confrontation that forced the presenters to flee the country. Former producer Andy Wilman has now gone on record to insist the plate was genuine and not a deliberate provocation.
The Patagonia Special incident
In the Top Gear Patagonia Special, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May travelled to Argentina to film three classic sports cars across the country. The plan was to finish with a game of car football featuring Gary Lineker, aiming to avenge the 1986 World Cup semi-final controversy between England and Argentina and settle the score over Maradona's Hand of God behind the wheel. However, all plans were cancelled after locals spotted the number plate on Jeremy's Porsche read 'H982 FKL'.
An angry mob formed outside the trio's hotel, and all attempts to reason with them and negotiate with local officials and police were unsuccessful. Protesters warned there would be violence, and the presenters were rushed to a local airport and hastily flown out of the country. The rest of the film crew were forced to move their kit and convoy through Argentina in search of the border crossing with Chile, but were accosted by a blockade which pelted them with rocks. Given word that an even larger mob of 300 vehicles was waiting for them in the next town, the crew were forced to go off-road and cross a river to escape cross-country, genuinely fearing for their lives.
Andy Wilman's account
Andy Wilman, who met Jeremy at boarding school in Doncaster and struck up a friendship that would see the pair work together on TV for decades, addressed the subject in his recent book, Mr Wilman's Motoring Adventure. He stressed that the plate was genuine, and they hadn't seen the controversy coming. He wrote: 'Let's say the sceptics are right. Let's say we did frig the number plate. To do that, we wouldn't have been able to start the construction of the film with actual cars; we'd have had to base the whole Special around a comedy number plate.'
He continued: 'As was proven, remember, the number plates were genuine; they'd been on that Porsche for donkey's years. So we would have needed a car with a genuine number plate with a particular arrangement of comedy letters and numbers. First off, we'd have to go to the DVLA and bribe them to break the law by telling us who has number plates of this nature, and where they live.'
'Then, assuming we'd got away with that, we'd have to hope that the number plate wasn't on a Fiesta diesel or a bus, but on something tasty, as befits a Top Gear special. The chances of that happening: that it's not just a sporty V8, but also one that happened to play a special personal moment in Jeremy's life as it sped him towards his dying father are a trillion to one.' He added: 'I tell you what, I'll happily give the fee for this book to anyone who can present credible evidence that we deliberately chose those plates.'
Richard Porter's perspective
Former Top Gear and The Grand Tour script writer Richard Porter also addressed the row in his tell-all insider book, And On That Bombshell. He wrote: 'The trouble was, we were hoisted by our own petard. To an outsider, this sounded exactly like the sort of idiotic thing Top Gear would do. Personally, I thought it seemed too subtle to be one of our daft endeavours.'
'We'd have daubed things down the side of our cars, as we did in North America all those years ago. And there was no way we were going to do that or anything like it because we already had the extensive research and warnings from local fixers, which told us that the Falklands situation was a hot topic in Argentina, it was being raised again by a sabre-rattling government, and we should not make light of it if we wanted to come home alive. We had no idea that our best intentions would be betrayed by a horrible quirk of fate.'
