The Top Gear Story

by Martin Roach

  Richard began his first actual speed run at 12.54pm, but not before an extensive list of checks had to be made, all of which were recorded. Once the star began his test runs, events proceeded to plan. Initially his speed was relatively modest, although that’s all relative as the first run went to 206.1mph. After each run, he was filmed to capture his reaction.

  As he became more comfortable with the controls, the speeds accelerated and it was clear from fairly quickly on that he was capable of going very fast indeed. They broke for lunch after the third run, which had reached 220.4mph. It was now decided that Hammond was doing sufficiently well to be able to engage the afterburner. In total, he would complete six runs, with the afterburner only being used on runs four, five and six – although on run four it did not ignite properly after he had not pressed the igniter switch for long enough and so the run was aborted after less than a kilometre. It was after using the afterburner successfully for the first time that he said those prophetic words: ‘I’m so alive! I’m so alive!’

  The penultimate run of the day, his sixth, was a complete run with the afterburner on full-length. With the afterburner on, the car was generating 10,000-brake horsepower – that’s the equivalent of 10 Bugatti Veyrons, or 18 Ferrari 458s, or 100 Ford Fiestas. The Red Arrows could generate up to 3500lb of thrust when using Rolls-Royce engines fitted to the car; however, with the afterburner lit, this was increased to a mind-boggling 5000lb of thrust.

  The sixth run registered 314mph, although Hammond was not told of this speed in order to be able to capture his elation on-camera later on hearing the news; a member of PTLE was overheard saying, ‘That was highly impressive!’ It would have been a British record. As mentioned, however, the correct stringent monitoring procedures were not in place (this was not an official attempt, as the Top Gear team had repeatedly pointed out) and so the achievement did not qualify.

  The run was originally scheduled to be the final attempt as the shoot was provisionally planned to end at 5pm, partly to keep noise levels limited, but it was decided to gain an extension to the booking to allow one final run to capture footage of the Vampire’s afterburner being lit. Part of the reason seems to be that the team were worried about wet weather the next day and no one was prepared to send Hammond out in the Vampire in such treacherous conditions. With the prospect of the second day’s filming being rained off, they decided to take one more run: this final extended run, the seventh of the day at 5.25pm, was the one which nearly cost Richard Hammond his life.

  He later said: ‘I suppose it’s like when you were playing outside as a kid and then your mum called you in for dinner. You’d always stay out for a bit longer,’ to which Clarkson responded, ‘And that’s when you’d always fall out the tree!’

  Exactly 14.25 seconds into the seventh run, after a distance of 1,120 metres had been covered and with the Vampire travelling at 288mph, the front right tyre blew out. The car veered off sharply to the right, and dug into the grassy outfield, before turning over and rolling several times. Finally, it flipped over end-to-end, then travelled forwards (while upside down at 230mph) and came to rest inverted, perpendicular to the line of the track and over 60 metres from the runway.

  In seconds, the medical teams were on the car. Former fire fighter Dave Ogden, owner of Event Fire Services, was one of the first at the scene – footage later showed the medics arrived within 10 seconds. He told the BBC news team: ‘[The car] went onto the grass and spun over and over before coming to a rest about 100 yards from us.’ Indeed, it was upside-down and ‘dug in’ to the grass. Ogden immediately felt for a pulse and could hear Hammond breathing, although at this point he was unconscious.

  Eventually, once it was clear that Richard was safe to move, the emergency crews righted the car and began the delicate process of cutting him out with hydraulic shears. As they did so, he began to regain consciousness although Ogden also said he ‘drifted in and out a little bit’. The air ambulance reached the site in an astonishing 15 minutes and once he was safely in the helicopter, it was reported that he became a little agitated as he wanted to do ‘a piece to camera’ about the crash.

  Hammond was airlifted to Leeds General Infirmary’s neurological unit, where he was listed as critically ill. It was reported that he had suffered superficial facial injuries due to the dirt which had dislodged the visor and been forced inside his helmet; there was a minor eye injury (some dirt was also forced up his nose) but most worry of all, he had suffered bruising and swelling to the brain due to ‘head acceleration effects’, also known as ‘shock loading’.

  The hospital spokesman would only reveal: ‘He has seen some improvement overnight but remains in a serious, but stable condition.’ He went on to say that Hammond’s wife was at his bedside and at the request of the family no more information would be released.

  When the news of the horrific crash broke, the BBC was inundated with thousands of well-wishers sending Richard their thoughts. The website alone received over 10,000 messages from worried fans wishing him a speedy recovery. Donations of £50,000+ were sent in to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, who had got the presenter to the neurological unit in just 12 minutes. All the newspapers ran front-page coverage and television news crews had regular updates; some of the pieces focussed on the fact that he’d wanted to do a piece to camera even as he lay on a stretcher. It seems bizarre now and makes me think of the stuntman in The Simpsons, who attempts all sorts of insane daredevil escapades which see him get mangled and battered to within an inch of his life only to somehow always lift a thumb up afterwards to alert the crowd that he is alive … just. But this wasn’t a cartoon, it had actually happened and it was anything but funny.

  However, The Simpsons’ character is not some comical creation based on mere fiction; research suggests serious head-injury victims often have distinct moments of clarity in the instant aftermath of an incident before the physiological reality hits home. In this instance, Hammond’s professionalism came to the fore: he instinctively believed that if they missed the chance to get a piece to camera with his genuine reaction, the feature would be not as good.

  Initially the watching world was told that Richard’s recovery would take fifteen months in hospital; incredibly he went home after only five weeks and the doctors treating him advised that he was on course for a 100 per cent recovery. Speaking at the time, James May seemed optimistic about his colleague’s chances for a full recovery: ‘He’s fit and he’s a very simple mechanism,’ he told the Daily Mail, ‘It would be like trying to break a tin-opener – you can’t really break a tin-opener. I suspect Hammond was a handy scrapper at school.’

  Of course this was an endearing brave face: behind the scenes, the Top Gear team were all shocked and deeply shaken by the trauma. Clarkson also visited his friend frequently and the story goes that at one of his first visits, less than 48 hours after the accident, Hammond sat up in bed and asked why he was there. Clarkson told him that he’d been in an accident, to which Hammond is reported to have replied, ‘Was I driving like a twat?’ May visited frequently too and even took the recuperating star a Lego tractor and plough. There was a hidden poignancy to this gift – Richard had once revealed that as a kid he used to watch old Top Gear and afterwards, make Lego models of the cars he’d just seen on the show.

  Hammond suffered from post-traumatic amnesia, a common result of brain injury. One story he later recounted was asking the nurse for a cottage pie and then when the food arrived, he said, ‘That’s great! It’s my favourite, how did you know?’ Immediately after being moved from the critical ward to recuperation at Bristol’s BUPA hospital, Hammond was chatting to his wife Mindy and suddenly said, ‘You’re lovely, but I’ve got to stop talking to you because I’ve got to go back to my wife – she’s French.’ Yet at all times he could remember the number plate of his first-ever car, that Shelby-liveried Toyota Corolla. Even more bizarrely perhaps, his childhood Birmingham accent returned for a few days. Later he described his head as being like ‘a bag of snakes’
from the trauma and Mindy has confirmed that she would often find him crouching on the hospital bed, clutching his head in agony.

  ‘If I look at my best friend,’ says neuroscientist Dr Kerry Spackman, ‘there’s part of my brain that tells me they’re a man, another part tells me that they’re a good mate, another part tells me what they do for a living, another part tells me their name and who they are and how I know them; all these connections are stored in different parts of the brain, not just in one place – there’s not a “best friend” place. So this is where you can get some very bizarre things [happening after brain injury] because you can know somebody but not know your relationship to them, or perhaps you can know the relationship, but not know their name.

  ‘The original circuits that were connected to all the parts of who his wife was – in fact, the whole personality of some of those circuits – might have been damaged permanently and what’s happened is he’s grown new circuits around them to make up for that. So, basically he’s had to relearn some of those tasks and that’s why he’ll feel he’s not quite the same: he’ll still be Richard Hammond but there’ll always be some parts of him that will be ever so slightly different.’

  Nonetheless, he continued to make great progress and was indeed discharged from hospital after five weeks. His first post-crash interview was with the Daily Mirror, for whom he also writes a column, and he revealed the extent of his immediate danger when paramedics rushed to him while he was still trapped in the wreckage. Speaking from ‘a secret hideaway’ where he was recovering with his wife and daughters, Richard said: ‘Doctors use a point system: fifteen is normal, three is a flat-line; I was a three – I was that close to being dead. I was in a bad way when they came to get me. The air ambulance guys were amazed I was still breathing.’ (Trivia fans note: the surname Hammond has its roots in Norse history and the William the Conqueror era, but is generally understood to mean ‘protected’.)

  Hammond seemed remarkably philosophical about his near-death experience. His most high-profile TV interview shortly after the crash was actually on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross. ‘There was a sense of “Oh, bugger,”’ he told Ross, in typically light-hearted fashion. He also said he could not recall asking to do the piece to camera in the helicopter, or for that matter ‘the first few weeks.’ What’s more, it soon transpired that he had very little recollection of the crash itself – again, not uncommon – instead saying that he recalls getting into the jet car and then his next memory was waking up in hospital. Speaking to Sir Stirling Moss on their one-off interview show, Hammond revealed that as his car went out of control, he felt no fear, instead having some strange feeling that there was a ‘To Do’ list he’d ticked off that day and dying in a crash was next on the schedule.

  David Coulthard – who nearly lost his life in a fatal plane crash in 2000 – confirmed to this author that in any such high-speed accident, people’s experiences can be very subjective and each incident is different: ‘Sometimes you hit a wall before you know it, your mind is on the next corner and it goes but other times you feel it going, you try to recover, you do all the instinctive things that you would do and you never give up until the accident comes to a halt. But it depends on the incident, of course and also on the individual: for example, other people tell me that when they’ve had crashes the noise is terrible but in all the many racing incidents I’ve had over the years, I don’t hear anything. In my experiences of car and plane crashes, I believe that my hearing shuts down so that my brain can focus on the senses that are needed to recover the accident or come out of the situation safely. Other senses take priority.’

  Two separate investigations were launched into the exact circumstances of the crash – normal procedure for such a devastating accident, particularly one being filmed. They were by the Health and Safety Executive and the BBC (who also fully co-operated with the H&SE). All the Top Gear presenters and production staff were confident of their preparations and maintained all safety procedures had been followed diligently.

  Former Top Gear producer Jon Bentley was involved in the programme years previous to the new safety legislation being introduced: ‘I do remember Health and Safety coming in – I wrote most of the generic risk assessment myself. I managed to argue against some notion that film crews would all have to wear high-visibility jackets while shooting at all times: we all thought, “Aaargh!” I managed to think up a reply to the Health and Safety people along the lines that the prospect of three or four people standing by the side of the road dressed in high-visibility jackets and pointing a camera would cause huge alarm to the average motorist and would be more likely to cause accidents than prevent them.

  ‘I was directing the first shoot after the legislation came in. As it happened, we were doing a potentially quite dangerous stunt, attempting to break a world record for the “flaming dominoes”. We had twelve cars standing vertically on end, we then set fire to them and a veteran stunt driver in a Jaguar was going to drive through them all and knock them down. We managed to break the record and nobody was hurt. I don’t think Health and Safety stopped us doing anything.’

  The Health & Safety Executive has become something of a pariah in modern British culture, berated as a killjoy organisation that ruins the fun things in life such as driving fast cars or playing conkers (with, or without caravans). Indeed, Top Gear has had a fairly terse relationship with the H&SE, with regular on-screen jibes about their demands. Timothy Walker, director-general of the Health and Safety Executive, has been quoted in the media as saying: ‘I am sorry Jeremy Clarkson believed that health and safety was the “cancer of a civilised society”. I do not think the families of over 200 people killed at work each year would share his view.’

  Regardless of individuals’ opinions of the H&SE’s validity – or lack of – there’s no denying that the report compiled after the crash investigation was so phenomenally extensive and detailed as to highlight the exact purpose of such an organisation so it is perhaps ironic that Top Gear has helped to show the H&SE has a very important role to play in society in general.

  The investigation was led by principal inspector Keith King, who appears to have been exhaustive in his attention to detail: he interviewed every principal participant, from the Top Gear staff, the PTLE owners, people on site on the day to technical experts and even Richard Hammond himself, who met with him to discuss the crash in mid-December.

  King’s report focussed on a number of areas, but three in particular: the planning and preparation undertaken by the BBC and other parties involved, the training given to Richard Hammond and a technical examination of the vehicle and its tyres. Having read all the staggering minutiae and technical detail of the full Health and Safety Executive Report into the incident, I came away with the feeling that this was, above all, an accident.

  No stone was left unturned by the H&SE. For the examination of the car, specialist evidence was obtained within the organisation on ergonomic issues, complemented by expert advice from the Transport Research Laboratory about the tyres, as well as information from the North Yorkshire Police regarding the vehicle itself and the crash scene. The BBC also appointed their own consultant to examine the tyres.

  The detailed examination of the car by the H&SE showed that many of the safety features were in excellent working order: the roll bar had worked, the harness performed perfectly, the chassis was relatively undamaged and the fuel system had no leaks. The left side front wheel and brake assembly had sheared off as they were designed to do and were found some 80 metres away from the car; the crash helmet was highlighted by the report as suffering no ‘significant structural damage … There were two impact damage marks to the right and to the rear of the crown of the helmet’, which the report suggested was the result of being ‘struck against a bar-like object’. PTLE later said they had seen crashes at higher speeds that received less helmet damage and suggested this may have been caused by the camera clamp being used to film cockpit footage (a fact acknowledged by the H&SE as a possi
ble ‘exacerbating factor’).

  The wording of the report’s summary was very precise and included this note about the BBC’s preparations: ‘The investigation also identified failings in the BBC’s safety management systems relating to risk assessment and the procurement of services from others, and by PTLE in their risk assessment for the services they provided to the BBC at Elvington. These failings and other recommendations are being pursued with the two parties involved. However, when viewed against H&SE’s enforcement criteria, none of these failings merit prosecution.’ The report also stated that Colin Fallows was ‘a consummate jet propulsion engineer’ and that his knowledge was ‘encyclopaedic’. Further, that PTLE ‘operated at the extreme end of the automotive spectrum’, which necessarily carries a higher risk. Ultimately, the investigation stated that it had identified, ‘omissions by two of the parties involved, but finds no grounds for prosecution.’

  Although the report highlighted a minor number of areas of concern, it went on to say that several factors were vital in probably saving Hammond’s life: these included the Vampire’s roll bar and immense structural strength (the cockpit area was left completely intact), the driver’s restraints that Hammond found so suffocating to have put on him, the crash helmet and the rapid response of the entire team present when the crash occurred.

  The BBC’s own cockpit footage clearly shows a tyre blow-out on the front offside wheel. Telemetry later revealed that Hammond was not braking at the moment of explosion – in other words, he was unaware of a problem in advance. The H&SE report confirmed ‘catastrophic failure’ was the ‘immediate cause’ and the speed when the incident occurred was confirmed at precisely 288mph. Close forensic examination of the tyre revealed it had been damaged as a result of an object (or objects) entering the sidewall immediately adjacent to the edge of the tread during the previous run. Although a blister was visible in the tyre’s outer side, this appeared to have subsided and was not visible to the naked eye as they prepared for the final run. It was therefore a ticking and hidden time bomb.