Plot Synopsis

RICHARD HAMMOND'S BIG is a one-hour docuseries that follows Richard Hammond, as he spotlights engineering at its finest with the biggest structures in the world. With decades' worth of knowledge in all things motor, science, adrenaline, engineering and more, Hammond embarks on a global adventure -- from the UK to the USA and beyond -- to explore the planet's biggest structures and machines and the incredible ways engineers have supersized our world. From Italy to Austria and The Netherlands, Hammond goes behind the scenes of these colossal structures and machines to understand the science of 'big' and how some of the world's brightest minds build, drive, fly and use these superstructures every day. Each of the nine episodes follows Hammond to a new location with exclusive access to world-class demos and experiments that spotlight the incredible challenges these architects, engineers and inventors have overcome as they've pushed the frontiers of scale in the quest for the next BIG thing. From the world's biggest car factory in Wolfsburg, Germany where space and technology allows one enormous Volkswagen car plant to churn out a new car every 16 seconds, to the Austrian mega-dam that features dozens of tunnels and passageways hidden within a dam wall while withstanding an incredible 200M tons of water, BIG spotlights the ludicrous and implausible feats of human ingenuity around the world. Also featured is the world's longest railway connection -- the Brenner Base Tunnel -- in the heart of the Austrian/Italian alps, the Marie Maersk container ship which sails from Asia to Europe carrying 18,000 containers weighing in at an incredible quarter of a million tons, as well as the US Air Force's biggest cargo plane which has broken more world records than any other cargo plane ever built.

"I love making engineering shows because I'm fascinated by the science and people behind some truly amazing feats," said Hammond. "Whether it's a container ship a quarter of a mile long or the longest rail tunnel in the world 2km under the Alps, or a massive hydroelectric dam, or an oil platform -- once you get to a giant scale, how does that change how it works? And what is it like to live and work with?"