Clarkson and Hammond cop driving ban

If you've watched even a single episode of Top Gear, you'll wonder why it took this long for police to catch the hosts speeding. Staple fare on the popular BBC show includes segments with Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond -- and occasionally James 'Captain Slow' May -- speeding supercars on public highways all over the world.

However, this time they've been caught, fined on the spot, and banned from driving in France after the gendarmes clocked them allegedly doing more than 140km/h in a 90km/h zone. That 50km/h over the legal limit puts them in the instant no-drive bin on French soil. The pair ended up in passenger seats, with the Top Gear camera crew driving the Aston and Porsche back to the UK. It has not been revealed how long the driving ban will last, and the show could argue that their segments shot in France are valuable tourism publicity for the country.

They'd been caught on radar with Clarkson behind the wheel of an Aston Martin Vanquish and Hammond helming a Porsche 911 GT3, and then pulled over when they went through a later tollbooth – a common practice on French highways, where the registration numbers of offending cars are sent on ahead to police waiting at each toll point.

And Clarkson, it seems, was not happy, judging by his column in The Sun newspaper. "If you are going to break the speed limit, make sure you are not in France," he wrote. "You would be advised to pay attention to what happened next. Because the on-the-spot fine was everything we had in our wallets. We were left penniless. And they took away our driving licences. No court case. No arguing. Nothing."

What they did get was some extra publicity for the Christmas DVD they were filming at the time, titled The Perfect Road Trip -- which coincidentally went on sale the day after Clarkson's column appeared.

Watch the desktop version of "The Perfect Road Trip" DVD trailer here.

This reporter is on Twitter: @KarlaPincott