Top Gear's Richard Hammond 'paid himself £2.5m' after quitting BBC show

Richard Hammond of Top Gear fame reportedly paid himself £2.5m ($3.28m) after leaving the BBC, it has been reported.

The 47-year-old English presenter is said to have taken two eye-watering dividend payments of £1.918m and £527,000, accounts reveal.

The Sun claims that the money is paid to him and wife Mindy – who happen to be the only shareholders in Hammond's television company Hamster's Wheel Productions – in the last two years.

Hammond earned £500,000 a year from the BBC for starring on Top Gear alongside Jeremy Clarkson and James May. This means that his pay cheque has more than doubled since appearing on The Grand Tour for Amazon, as his company was left with £2.3m profits after the dividends were paid out.

The firm paid £18,000 in tax last year and £243,000 the previous year.

Hammond and his co-hosts Clarkson and May have won critical acclaim for their new motoring TV series for Amazon Prime, The Grand Tour, with the launch episode becoming the streaming service's most watched premiere episode ever.

Fans of the show are already getting excited for the second series after a trailer was released on 1 November featuring a Lamborghini Aventador S, Honda NSX, Ariel Nomad and Kia Stinger FT, and stated that it will commence on 8 December.

The filming of the second series hasn't come without any drama, with Hammond being airlifted to hospital after being involved in a huge motoring accident in Switzerland.

He was driving a £2m supercar when he lost control and it flipped over, bursting into flames. He was treated in hospital for serious injuries – the worst of which was a fractured knee which required an operation. Following the accident, he left the road and mounted a grassy verge where he managed to escape the flames and smoke.

In dramatic scenes, he undid his seatbelt to flee just before the car flipped down the hill and erupted. He had been attending a car race in St Gallen, Switzerland.