Not being able to mend broken toys upset young Jimmy De Ville so much that he started unscrewing mechanical gadgets and tried to put them together. Several decades later, his first TV series, Engine Addict, on Discovery Turbo takes him to six countries where he dismantles various cars and uses their individual parts to create a new automobile. He shares his adventures with Shrabasti Mallik

Engine Addictis your first series in front of the camera. Tell us something about the concept of the show.

In the show we travel to six countries around the world and meet local who are the local heroes there. They’re people who really know the engine and have worked with it throughout their lives. So they’re the true experts in that they’re the real engine addicts. I meet them, they introduce me to the engine vehicle, I find out about it, I get my own. And in that process I learn about the engine. That frankly gives me an idea or helps me form an idea of how to take that engine to the next level.

Then what we do in the show is take the engine out of its normal comfort zone where it has already proven itself and take it to the next level, and try to push it that little bit further just to see what engine is really capable of. I do that by putting the engine into an extreme machine that I build around it and then challenging that machine against some of the harshest environments in the world. And we learn a bit of history about the engine as well along the way. So it’s sort of a journey for engines and me.

What are the places that you toured for the showIJ

We went to Brazil in South America, Poland, India, Sweden, Austria and UK. We haven’t been to South Asia yet, but that is big yet. The world is full of amazing engines and amazing places and my passion is going to as many of them as I can. There’s a lot of the world out there that I’d love to go to and we have to wait and see how this series goes on.

What attracts you to old combustion engines and run down carsIJ

I think engines are sort of like mechanical living things, and people have a real fascination with them because it’s like they are alive. And we can take an engine that’s alive and we can supercharge it to make it an Olympian. And we have that power to take an engine that is sort of a run-of-the-mill every day type and turn it into a superhero, and that's a real power. It’s like having superpowers, and we can sort of live that through engineering. I think it’s very addictive in that respect that you can have a dream.

Share with us one of your most memorable experiences during the shoot of Engine Addict.

What is really cool about the project we’ve just done is they are all my dream, they came from my head, and so the last eight months that we’ve been making this I have been living my dream. And people also ask me which one’s my favorite. Well, the reality is that they all are, because they all came from my head and I’m absolutely excited about every single one of them.

So the answer to that is there isn’t one dream, there are many, and we live in a world where we’ve got to chase our dreams. So I’ve already lived six dreams by making this first series, and hopefully that will continue. They’re all equal dreams. Some are more amazing than others, in different ways, but they’re all brilliant.

What is it about the field of engineering that interested youIJ When did you decide to be an engineerIJ

I don’t know how I discovered it. I don’t know if I discovered it or really something within me just sort of burned hard and from a very early age. As a young child at the age of eight, I just started liking pulling things apart. I got really frustrated when I broke a toy and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t fix it. Surely if someone had made it then I could fix it. So I just started trying with string and tape to fix things. And it just grew from there, and I found that actually sometimes I could make things better and stronger. So it was sort of fuelled by the frustration of breaking things and wanting to improve them and play with them more. So as you get bigger and older the toys just get bigger really.

And it was just in that process of working it out myself, which I’d never done before, that I found a real passion and excitement. There’s no greater feeling than building an engine and then driving a vehicle for the first time. It’s hard — it’s throbbing hard — but you create it.

You are also a qualified Class One Small Arms British Army Armourer involved with the development, maintenance and use of firearms and equipment. Tell us something about this exciting life of yours.

I’ve always been into building things — from around the age of eight — making things and building things. Where my fascination came is actually I traveled to the Falcon Islands off the coast of South America when I was 17 or 18 and I lived in a remote settlement at a sheep farm there where I had no access to the outside world other than a plane once a week and a boat once a month.

So I was able to buy myself an old land Rover. There are no roads there and it was completely broken and it was that vehicle with its engine that gave me freedom, which I loved. To get the freedom, I had to work very hard to make the land Rover work, but I found a real passion and enjoyment there, and so when I came back to England the first thing I did was buy a land Rover.

The only problem was the engine was in pieces in the back, because it had blown up. So the first thing I had to do before I could drive the car was build the engine. You never forget that feeling. I think we all remember the first time we ever drove a car or a motor bike. You have that sense of freedom with a vehicle, but that sense of freedom is amplified massively when you’ve actually built it as well. And from there I discovered a new complete passion for myself.

The show is telecasted every Monday at 9pm