Every Top Gear fan remembers the little excursion that Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond took through the southeastern corridor and the very warm reception they received in rural Alabama.

For those of you who haven't seen that episode or still can't grasp the concept of sarcasm, you can watch the whole thing here. The long and the short of it is the challenge ended at a backwoods gas station where a group of nearby hillbillies attacked their cars and the crew's vans with rocks, sticks and just about anything their beer stained hands could grab without the need of an opposable thumb.

Hammond wrote in his new memoir Or Is That Just Me? that fans constantly ask him if those rednecks were the genuine article or "just made up for the telly." Hammond not only insisted in an excerpt from the book printed in The Times that they were real people, but they also gave him one of the biggest scares of his life.