The TV company set up by Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow former Top Gear hostshas made more than £8m in profits following the first season of their big budget Amazon show The Grand Tour.

In 2015, Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and Andy Wilman, the former Top Gear executive producer, signed a three-series deal to create a rival to the hit BBC2 motoring show for a reported £160m.

The team then set up W Chump & Sons – a combination of their names – which has filed accounts providing the first insight into the lucrative deal. 

The first series of the Grand Tour, which smashed Amazon video viewing and TV subscriber sign-up records, ran for 13 episodes from November to February.

The accounts show that W Chump & Sons made £8.39m in pre-tax profits from the point of incorporation in November 2015 to the end of last year.

The post-tax profit – effectively the funds in the pockets of the shareholders – came to £6.7m. The company paid £1.67m in UK corporation tax.

“The profit was driven by television programming produced during the period ended 31 December 2016,” said the company in its accounts. “The directors are keen to continue focusing on producing quality programming whilst ensuring that the company’s overheads are kept stable. The directors are satisfied with the results for the year end and will continue to pursue business opportunities as they arise in the future.”

The company employed 20 staff, excluding the four directors, with a total wage bill of £3m and reported £35.33m in turnover with nearly all of that referred to as related to the “terms of a commissioning agreement”.

This would indicate that it is the funds paid by Amazon for at least the first series to be made, which means that the overall value of the three-series deal appears to be significantly lower than the £160m reported.

Amazon, which has just launched the trailer for the second series, declined to comment on the commercial terms of the deal with Clarkson and his partners.

The Grand Tour hit the headlines when Hammond suffered two accidents during filming. The first was a minor motorbike crash in a remote part of Mozambique. The second was much more serious when Hammond wrote-off a Rimac supercar in a crash that resulted in the £2m vehicle bursting into flames.

Clarkson tweeted that the crash, after which Hammond was airlifted to hospital in Switzerland where the episode was being filmed, was the “biggest and most frightening” he had ever seen.Last year, Clarkson and his co-presenters launched DriveTribe, a social network for motoring fans, financed by their own investments and backing of almost £10m from investors including 21st Century Fox and early Facebook backer Jim Breyer. The business lost its launch chief executive, Ernesto Schmidt, the former senior EMI executive, just six months after launch.

Clarkson, who writes a column for the Sun and the Sunday Times, was dropped as co-host of Top Gear in 2015 after he punched producer Oisin Tymon in a row over hot food after a day’s filming. Hammond and May also quit the BBC following the departure of Clarkson. At the BBC, he made tens of millions of pounds from Top Gear’s huge international success from Bedder 6, a company he set up with the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide.

As the global popularity of Top Gear grew – it is the BBC’s biggest global brand with sales of the TV show, DVDs, books, live shows and other merchandise worth more than £50m annually – Clarkson pocketed increasingly large sums of money revealed each year in the company’s accounts.

After five years of increasingly embarrassing payouts being made public, BBC Worldwide, which originally set up Bedder 6 to keep Clarkson and Wilman loyal to the hugely successful programme, and reduce the amount of money paid out by licence fee-payers, took full control of the company in 2012.

Hammond and May were not shareholders in Bedder 6, but did begin to take a share of Top Gear’s commercial revenue in return for promoting the show globally, as part of a new deal they signed to carry on co-presenting Top Gear in 2012.