He's about to hit the road with fellow Top Gear hosts Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond for their second world tour but hasn't quite got his head around why millions of motoring fans still can't get enough of their phenomenally popular show.
About 340,000 people globally are expected to snap up tickets to see the latest live version of the hit TV show, which roars into Sydney in February 2010.
But after seven years as a top-rating show on the tele, what is it that continues to drive Top Gear's popularity? Is it the fast cars, the stunts, the noise or the mysterious Stig? Quietly pondering the question while sitting in the sedate confines of London's Royal Geographical Society, May is not quite sure.
"I don't know," is his first answer after a long pause.
"It's a complete mystery. "It's three rather annoying blokes who don't really like each other, let's be honest.
"It baffles me. I'm very grateful but I can't tell you what it is." Then it hits him -- the show is actually a public service in disguise.
"It sounds terribly poncey but the only way I can explain it is that Top Gear is a sort of conduit for other people's concerns and frustrations that we work out on their behalf," he says, a smile spreading across his face.
"It's a service to the people. That's how we like to think of it." The 300 million or so fans that tune in to the show around the world would probably agree.
If you want to know about fast cars, how they crash, how to destroy caravans or drive to the north pole using your sat nav, then this is the show for you.
For Hammond, the secret to the show's success is that nothing much has changed since it first went to air -- in its latest incarnation -- in Britain in 2002.
"On the television show it's our 14th series and cars are still important in the way that they are," he says.
"We walk out on stage, it's still the same three idiots.
"There was never any artifice in the three of us. We haven't been created. Do you know, we're not a boy band? Looking at us you probably would guess that.
"The moment we have to force that, the moment we walk out in a room full of people and we're consciously having to make the effort and then we'd turn to old gags then it wouldn't work.
"It only works because it's spontaneous." There's certain to be plenty of spontaneity in the touring show.
Kicking off in London in November before travelling to Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, the show will feature plenty of thrills and spills with the world's first indoor loop-the-loop for cars.
There'll also be flaming rally cars, extreme underground street racers, cars which change colour, stunts by the Stig as well as the ever-popular "cool wall".
For dare-devil Clarkson, who will host the Sydney shows with May while Hammond takes a break, it's racing the flaming cars that he's most looking forward to.
"I have this thing about car racing, which has got quite boring now that they've put too much safety into it," he says.
"So we thought it would be quite fun to have a motor race where the cars are set on fire before they set off.
"You can either drive slowly to stop the flames licking over or you can go really fast like in Memphis Belle." But he adds that it's hardly his most dangerous stunt.
"Riding a helicopter-engine drag snow mobile on a frozen river in Sweden," Clarkson nominates as the most scariest thing he's done.
"It was for a program called Extreme Machines. The director said, `Well you've got to ride it now because the light's going'.
"I said, `I haven't had any practice', and he said: `You'll be right'.
"And off I went. There you are -- no health and safety at all and I wasn't killed. Breakfast was left 300 yards down the road though." May himself had less luck when a stunt he was filming for the new series of the TV show went wrong in England on Wednesday.
He was aboard a caravan attached to a bright orange airship when strong winds blew it off course, causing it to crash into a field near a busy road instead of on a cricket pitch as planned.
The 46-year-old had reportedly been racing Hammond, who was behind the wheel of a Lamborghini on the ground.
May intends to remain firmly on the ground once in Australia and is looking forward to putting some locally-made cars through their paces.
"I quite like the way the country breeds the type of car and the type of driver," he says.
"In Europe, it's largely disappearing because it's becoming homogenised.
"There is a reason the British sports car evolved the way it did and the Italian one and they're fairly similar. But the German sports car is a different thing and it's because of the type of road, the terrain, the sort of people, the background.
"And the great thing about Australia is that it's such a very different country that the philosophy is different.
"Last time I was there I drove an XR8 and the Holden Commodore, I think it was the GTS when they first started putting the big V8 in and supercharging it.
"I remember thinking if I actually lived in a place as big as Australia -- it's so big you can't really drive across it reasonably, it's just bloody massive it's ridiculous -- but if I did you would want a car like that. "And I quite like cars like that anyway.
"But I wouldn't want a Mazda MX5, which I like, or a Mini or a Lamborghini Gallardo in Australia."
