James May's story of how he got fired from car magazine is the most James May story of all time
Published on Feb 15, 2026 at 4:40 AM (UTC+4)
by Daisy Edwards
Last updated on Feb 13, 2026 at 5:46 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Amelia Jean Hershman-Jones
If you’re a fan of James May, listen up: the story of how he got fired from a popular car magazine is the most James May story of all time.
It happened back in 1992, long before Top Gear turned him into Captain Slow.
May was working at Autocar as a production editor, doing painstaking page work on the annual Road Test Yearbook.
Then he decided to entertain himself in the nerdiest, most chaotic way possible.
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Top Gear star got fired from a car magazine
Back in 1992, Top Gear celebrity James May was responsible for putting together Autocar’s annual Road Test Yearbook, a hefty roundup of 100 road tests from that year.
The format was strict: each review had to be hacked down to around 150 words so four could fit on every spread.
It was also, in the Top Gear star’s words, ‘brutally boring’, and it took months.
This was early desktop publishing territory, which meant he was right in the weeds, rewriting, trimming, and forcing every paragraph to behave on the page.
But each mini review had a big drop cap at the start, a huge, fashionable letter that kicked off the text.
And May realized he could use those big initials to spell something out across the whole feature, if he rewrote each piece to start with the exact letter he needed.
That meant wrangling sentences into unnatural shapes just to land, say, a K at the beginning of a paragraph.
It also meant quietly recruiting sub-editors so nobody ‘fixed’ his deliberately clunky phrasing and ruined the sequence.
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The most James May story of all time
The hidden message made it into print, and when you read the drop caps in order, it spelled out a full grumble about the job itself: “so you think this is really good, you should try making the bloody thing up, it’s a real pain in the arse.”
May had basically built an acrostic tantrum into one of the UK’s biggest motoring magazines, and it somehow slipped past the usual checks.
Then the public got involved, and readers started calling Autocar, apparently thinking the strange letter pattern was a puzzle and there might be a prize.
Management found out, and May got summoned upstairs.
He hadn’t even met the managing director, but he walked in, got told ‘you’re fired’, and was sent away from the car magazine without the company car.
Eight miles later, James May had a legendary origin story.
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As a Content Writer since January 2025, Daisy’s focus is on writing stories on topics spanning the entirety of the website. As well as writing about EVs, the history of cars, tech, and celebrities, Daisy is always the first to pitch the seed of an idea to the audience editor team, who collab with her to transform it into a fully informative and engaging story.
