Top Gear Presenter Richard Hammond Injured
Posted by intweb
He was probably luckier to actually roll on the grass when you think about it, look at how it has dug in (obviously lucky the roll bar survived but they are pretty hefty things). That would have hopefully absorbed some of the impact rather than rolling over tarmac which isn't going to get rid of the energy as well and may have caused more damage to the car which luckily stayed very well intact keeping his body safe.
vMax.Keiran
Velocity Maximum Simulation Racing
www.vMaxSR.com
www.liveforspeed.net LFS Status:
vMax.Keiran
Velocity Maximum Simulation Racing
www.vMaxSR.com
www.liveforspeed.net LFS Status:
Hell! That's fantastic news!
skel Wrote:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Well, yes, perhaps lucky to roll on the grass rather than tarmac,
> however the car only rolled because it went onto the grass and the
> tyres dug in. I reckon it would have rolled to a halt if it had stayed
> on the tarmac.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> skel
> "if it aint broke.....fix it til it is "
I doubt it would have stayed wheels down, the tyres would have eventually given way after going sideways and the wheels would then dig in. Happened to my Mum when she hit black ice at about 50mph the car went fully sideways and eventually rolled two times because the the tyres eventually wore through the canvas and had no air to hold them on the wheels. She was very lucky that the first time the car rolled the roof never hit anything and the second time it landed in the grass ditch. The mark it left in the grass I'd be surprised if the tarmac would have helped much at absorbing the energy.
@Gav
But the problem there is the rider is exposed, he wants to avoid the grass because that will throw him about like a rag doll. Hammond would have probably rolled with much more force on the tarmac and the car may well have torn its self to pieces (I suppose this could help absorb the energy but also could hurt him). I don't know how safe the cockpits of them things are but wasn't it not that long ago in F1 where drivers were often worrying about the suspension rods coming through into the cockpit?
It's all ifs and buts I know, I just thought he may well have been lucky to roll on the grass, but we will never know I guess.
I can't stand all these calls that he shouldn't have been driving the car, who is going to save a car like that when something goes wrong? He obviously wanted to be in that car, who here wouldn't? I'd love to experience 300mph. I just find it silly that they say a professional should have been driving it with lots of experience when professionals are killed, Senna pops to mind. Schumacher broke his leg when he had a mechanical failure.
So going by the comments some news reporters are making Senna and Schumacher aren't professional enough :/
Anyway good to see he is making amazing progress.
Keiran
vMax.Keiran
Velocity Maximum Simulation Racing
www.vMaxSR.com
www.liveforspeed.net LFS Status:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Well, yes, perhaps lucky to roll on the grass rather than tarmac,
> however the car only rolled because it went onto the grass and the
> tyres dug in. I reckon it would have rolled to a halt if it had stayed
> on the tarmac.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------
> skel
> "if it aint broke.....fix it til it is "
I doubt it would have stayed wheels down, the tyres would have eventually given way after going sideways and the wheels would then dig in. Happened to my Mum when she hit black ice at about 50mph the car went fully sideways and eventually rolled two times because the the tyres eventually wore through the canvas and had no air to hold them on the wheels. She was very lucky that the first time the car rolled the roof never hit anything and the second time it landed in the grass ditch. The mark it left in the grass I'd be surprised if the tarmac would have helped much at absorbing the energy.
@Gav
But the problem there is the rider is exposed, he wants to avoid the grass because that will throw him about like a rag doll. Hammond would have probably rolled with much more force on the tarmac and the car may well have torn its self to pieces (I suppose this could help absorb the energy but also could hurt him). I don't know how safe the cockpits of them things are but wasn't it not that long ago in F1 where drivers were often worrying about the suspension rods coming through into the cockpit?
It's all ifs and buts I know, I just thought he may well have been lucky to roll on the grass, but we will never know I guess.
I can't stand all these calls that he shouldn't have been driving the car, who is going to save a car like that when something goes wrong? He obviously wanted to be in that car, who here wouldn't? I'd love to experience 300mph. I just find it silly that they say a professional should have been driving it with lots of experience when professionals are killed, Senna pops to mind. Schumacher broke his leg when he had a mechanical failure.
So going by the comments some news reporters are making Senna and Schumacher aren't professional enough :/
Anyway good to see he is making amazing progress.
Keiran
vMax.Keiran
Velocity Maximum Simulation Racing
www.vMaxSR.com
www.liveforspeed.net LFS Status:
good news about him walking and talking. i heard on the radio that he just woke up and asked "what happened?".
and a bunch of motorists have raised £56,000 for the air ambulance that flew him to hospital.
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
and a bunch of motorists have raised £56,000 for the air ambulance that flew him to hospital.
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
heard on Sky news that Richard has asked people to send donations to the air ambulance instead of sending flowers to him, because Jeremy is taking the piss about all the flowers he's received!
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
That doesn't surprised me for one minute 
Found this article by Jeremy Clarkson about Hammond
IN the wee small hours of Thursday night, just 30 hours after what is almost certainly the world’s fastest ever car crash, Richard Hammond suddenly sat up in bed, opened his eyes and asked what had happened.
“You’ve been in a car accident,” I said. “Was I driving like a tw*t?” he asked, before getting out of bed and walking, shakily, to the lavatory.
His wife, Mindy, couldn’t believe her eyes. None of us could. It really did seem that he’d had a look through death’s door and decided he didn’t like what he saw on the other side.
Later, he looked across at James May and said: “Hello C**k face.”
Despite all the odds, it seemed we’d got our Hamster back . . .
Two years ago, Richard Hammond, James May and I agreed on a plan of action should one of us be killed while making our show, Top Gear.
We decided that after the announcement of the death was made in the following week’s show, the next word should be “anyway”.
So if the Hamster had ever careered through the Pearly Gates in a flaming 200mph fireball, I would put on a sombre face, say that Richard Hammond had died and then, after a small pause, say: “Anyway, the new Jag . . .”
It was a sort of joke. But then this week, it sort of wasn’t.
The idea to drive a jet car actually came from Hammond. He skedaddled into the office one day and, bubbling with his trademark enthusiasm, said: “Hey, why don’t we go somewhere and drive really fast? I don’t mean supercar fast. I mean REALLY fast.”
We all liked the idea. But what we liked even more was the idea of James May being given the assignment.
James is known to his fans as Captain Slow. He thinks dawdling is reckless and practises the art of what he calls “Christian Motoring”. Mostly, this involves letting people out of side turnings and generally being Edwardian.
Putting him, and that ’70s barnet, in a 370mph jet car was a bit like putting just Jane Austen at the helm of a space shuttle.
Immediately, James discovered a prior engagement and said he couldn’t go. I, meanwhile, decided that I spent most of my thirties upside down in jet fighters and helicopter gunships, vomiting, and that these days I was far too fat.
That left Hammond, who was bouncing around like the donkey in Shrek shouting, “Pick me. Pick me”.
And so we did.
Today, people who have absolutely no idea at all of how television works, (Yes, columnist Neil Lyndon — that’s you, you sanctimonious, rent-a-soundbite little t**d) are saying that our producers push us to do more and more dangerous stunts in a bid for ratings.
Rubbish. Our producers spend their whole lives filling in health and safety forms and asking “are you sure?”
It’s the presenters who come up with the hare-brained ideas and trans-continental races . . . not the backroom boys or the suits.
The car Hammond was set to drive is called the Vampire. It’s powered by a Rolls- Royce Orpheus jet engine — as used by the Red Arrows — and currently holds the British land speed record of 300.3mph.
So, the day before his fateful encounter, I shook Hammond’s hand and said “goodbye”.
“I’ll probably be killed,” he joked with a huge, beaming smile. “Anyway . . .”
He knew that he was embarking on a dangerous mission. And this is what no one seems to understand. He was looking forward to it. He likes the buzz.
He also knew that in Top Gear’s 28-year history, no one on the show has ever been hurt. Not even Ray Mears can claim that. Or Anthea Turner or even Janet Ellis.
Right now no one knows for sure what caused the accident. Film footage seems to point the finger of blame at a tyre. And that’s something you can’t prepare for.
The tyres were from a Nascar racer in America, chosen specifically because they have super-stiff side walls. But it does seem that one of them burst.
How fast was Richard going? Well on the run before, he’d reached 315mph. So it’s likely he’d hit that speed again. Richard isn’t the sort of man who goes backwards. If he thought he’d done 315, he’d be trying to do 317. Or 320. Or five million if he’d thought there was half a chance.
People with beards and dirty fingernails are now saying he should never have been in that car, doing that kind of speed. They make out it’s all terribly complicated and that you need years of practice.
Rubbish. From what I understand, you sit there, you push a lever to light the afterburner and you then push another to shut off the fuel supply — it runs on heating oil — and deploy the parachutes. A hamster could do it. In fact, a hamster did.
Of course, behind the scenes, there was a small army of people making sure all went well. The Vampire team had even brought along a device to measure wind speed. Nothing that could be left to chance had been left to chance. But chance itself was still sitting there, waiting to bite. As the car began its series of sickening rolls, at a speed that boggles the mind, Richard’s head was taking a ferocious pounding as his helmet smashed into the protective steel cage.
That was bad, but inside his body things were worse. He will have been subjected to maybe 100g. This means his brain will have weighed 71 stone.
And it was rolling around inside his head at 300 revs per minute.
He landed upside-down, with his helmet, full of soil, buried in the earth. Amazingly, he was alive. And more than that, after a few minutes of unconsciousness, he was lucid.
“I want to do a piece to camera”, he told the crew. He even fought the ambulancemen, who said he couldn’t. No surprises there. Richard likes fighting. He does it a lot.
When I first heard of the crash, I was doing a rather miserable 175mph in an Aston Martin at our test track in Surrey. Everyone was quite upbeat. He didn’t appear to be badly hurt. So I carried on driving round corners a little too quickly while shouting. I even went out for dinner with friends that night.
But later it became apparent that Richard was much more seriously injured than we’d thought. Doctors described his condition as critical.
At the hospital, his wife Mindy was being a star. She’s one of those women who takes things in her stride but this was something else. She was laughing. She was joking.
She’d told daughters Willow and Izzy that Daddy had crashed another car and messed up his clothes. So she was taking him some clean ones. Richard had a bad night. At four he was giving very serious cause for concern but as the sun rose, he’d rallied a bit.
He didn’t look very “rallied” to me. In fact, he looked like a Klingon, with a massively swollen eye and a huge lump on his forehead. The only good news, so far as I could see, was that his teeth were still as shiny and bright as ever.
It’s genuinely hard to know how Mindy could be so upbeat when her husband was so badly dented. They’d just exchanged contracts on a new house. They were about to take out a joint mortgage. And yet, she was still cheerful. James May and I weren’t. May even admits to having been “a bit unmanly” at one point.
There’s one thing though. All we ever hear about the NHS is that it’s rubbish. But anyone who ever experiences the emergency care it provides always notices just how un-rubbish it is in reality.
Leeds General Infirmary is a no star hospital. According to the bureaucrats, it’s terrible. But trust me on this. From where Richard Hammond was lying, it was about as terrible as Angelina Jolie’s left breast.
They were coping brilliantly with a forest of flowers being sent by well wishers. “They’re lovely,” said Mindy, and then, after a pause . . . “Do you think anyone will send cash donations?” Outside, in the real world, one internet site had raised £4,000 for the air ambulance that had saved Richard’s life. Sky News was deluged with thousands of goodwill messages. The Sun received messages from all over the world.
And there was some hope. While James was leaning over, whispering to our bashed-up friend, Mindy started to stroke his hair and I noticed the hamster’s heart rate had shot up from 60 to 75 beats per minute.
“Christ, James. He thinks you’re doing the stroking,” I yelled.
Quickly, the heart beat settled down again. Then came the moment when I said: “The reason you’re here mate is because you’re a c**p driver.”
And he smiled.
I knew then that he was going to pull through. And God it was a relief.
You can never tell after a brain injury what long-term implications there might be. He might have no sense of taste, or double vision. His teeth may go brown. Or he may be absolutely fine.
The only thing I knew was this: he was going to live.
And the next day after he said, “Hello C**kface” to James May, it looked like he might just win back everything else as well.
You’d think that the joyous news would silence the vultures circling the crash site since the accident, rejoicing in the fact that Top Gear had finally been taught its lesson that speed kills.
Somehow I doubt it though. The campaign to have us taken off the air — sparked curiously, by the BBC’s own news website — will now be ramped up, fuelled by the environmentalists and spearheaded by muddle-headed road safety campaigners.
LS's Tip of the week
ESSENTIAL OILS aren't essential unless you're an engine, a gearbox or a twat
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2006 07:19PM by LS..
IN the wee small hours of Thursday night, just 30 hours after what is almost certainly the world’s fastest ever car crash, Richard Hammond suddenly sat up in bed, opened his eyes and asked what had happened.
“You’ve been in a car accident,” I said. “Was I driving like a tw*t?” he asked, before getting out of bed and walking, shakily, to the lavatory.
His wife, Mindy, couldn’t believe her eyes. None of us could. It really did seem that he’d had a look through death’s door and decided he didn’t like what he saw on the other side.
Later, he looked across at James May and said: “Hello C**k face.”
Despite all the odds, it seemed we’d got our Hamster back . . .
Two years ago, Richard Hammond, James May and I agreed on a plan of action should one of us be killed while making our show, Top Gear.
We decided that after the announcement of the death was made in the following week’s show, the next word should be “anyway”.
So if the Hamster had ever careered through the Pearly Gates in a flaming 200mph fireball, I would put on a sombre face, say that Richard Hammond had died and then, after a small pause, say: “Anyway, the new Jag . . .”
It was a sort of joke. But then this week, it sort of wasn’t.
The idea to drive a jet car actually came from Hammond. He skedaddled into the office one day and, bubbling with his trademark enthusiasm, said: “Hey, why don’t we go somewhere and drive really fast? I don’t mean supercar fast. I mean REALLY fast.”
We all liked the idea. But what we liked even more was the idea of James May being given the assignment.
James is known to his fans as Captain Slow. He thinks dawdling is reckless and practises the art of what he calls “Christian Motoring”. Mostly, this involves letting people out of side turnings and generally being Edwardian.
Putting him, and that ’70s barnet, in a 370mph jet car was a bit like putting just Jane Austen at the helm of a space shuttle.
Immediately, James discovered a prior engagement and said he couldn’t go. I, meanwhile, decided that I spent most of my thirties upside down in jet fighters and helicopter gunships, vomiting, and that these days I was far too fat.
That left Hammond, who was bouncing around like the donkey in Shrek shouting, “Pick me. Pick me”.
And so we did.
Today, people who have absolutely no idea at all of how television works, (Yes, columnist Neil Lyndon — that’s you, you sanctimonious, rent-a-soundbite little t**d) are saying that our producers push us to do more and more dangerous stunts in a bid for ratings.
Rubbish. Our producers spend their whole lives filling in health and safety forms and asking “are you sure?”
It’s the presenters who come up with the hare-brained ideas and trans-continental races . . . not the backroom boys or the suits.
The car Hammond was set to drive is called the Vampire. It’s powered by a Rolls- Royce Orpheus jet engine — as used by the Red Arrows — and currently holds the British land speed record of 300.3mph.
So, the day before his fateful encounter, I shook Hammond’s hand and said “goodbye”.
“I’ll probably be killed,” he joked with a huge, beaming smile. “Anyway . . .”
He knew that he was embarking on a dangerous mission. And this is what no one seems to understand. He was looking forward to it. He likes the buzz.
He also knew that in Top Gear’s 28-year history, no one on the show has ever been hurt. Not even Ray Mears can claim that. Or Anthea Turner or even Janet Ellis.
Right now no one knows for sure what caused the accident. Film footage seems to point the finger of blame at a tyre. And that’s something you can’t prepare for.
The tyres were from a Nascar racer in America, chosen specifically because they have super-stiff side walls. But it does seem that one of them burst.
How fast was Richard going? Well on the run before, he’d reached 315mph. So it’s likely he’d hit that speed again. Richard isn’t the sort of man who goes backwards. If he thought he’d done 315, he’d be trying to do 317. Or 320. Or five million if he’d thought there was half a chance.
People with beards and dirty fingernails are now saying he should never have been in that car, doing that kind of speed. They make out it’s all terribly complicated and that you need years of practice.
Rubbish. From what I understand, you sit there, you push a lever to light the afterburner and you then push another to shut off the fuel supply — it runs on heating oil — and deploy the parachutes. A hamster could do it. In fact, a hamster did.
Of course, behind the scenes, there was a small army of people making sure all went well. The Vampire team had even brought along a device to measure wind speed. Nothing that could be left to chance had been left to chance. But chance itself was still sitting there, waiting to bite. As the car began its series of sickening rolls, at a speed that boggles the mind, Richard’s head was taking a ferocious pounding as his helmet smashed into the protective steel cage.
That was bad, but inside his body things were worse. He will have been subjected to maybe 100g. This means his brain will have weighed 71 stone.
And it was rolling around inside his head at 300 revs per minute.He landed upside-down, with his helmet, full of soil, buried in the earth. Amazingly, he was alive. And more than that, after a few minutes of unconsciousness, he was lucid.
“I want to do a piece to camera”, he told the crew. He even fought the ambulancemen, who said he couldn’t. No surprises there. Richard likes fighting. He does it a lot.
When I first heard of the crash, I was doing a rather miserable 175mph in an Aston Martin at our test track in Surrey. Everyone was quite upbeat. He didn’t appear to be badly hurt. So I carried on driving round corners a little too quickly while shouting. I even went out for dinner with friends that night.
But later it became apparent that Richard was much more seriously injured than we’d thought. Doctors described his condition as critical.
At the hospital, his wife Mindy was being a star. She’s one of those women who takes things in her stride but this was something else. She was laughing. She was joking.
She’d told daughters Willow and Izzy that Daddy had crashed another car and messed up his clothes. So she was taking him some clean ones. Richard had a bad night. At four he was giving very serious cause for concern but as the sun rose, he’d rallied a bit.
He didn’t look very “rallied” to me. In fact, he looked like a Klingon, with a massively swollen eye and a huge lump on his forehead. The only good news, so far as I could see, was that his teeth were still as shiny and bright as ever.
It’s genuinely hard to know how Mindy could be so upbeat when her husband was so badly dented. They’d just exchanged contracts on a new house. They were about to take out a joint mortgage. And yet, she was still cheerful. James May and I weren’t. May even admits to having been “a bit unmanly” at one point.
There’s one thing though. All we ever hear about the NHS is that it’s rubbish. But anyone who ever experiences the emergency care it provides always notices just how un-rubbish it is in reality.
Leeds General Infirmary is a no star hospital. According to the bureaucrats, it’s terrible. But trust me on this. From where Richard Hammond was lying, it was about as terrible as Angelina Jolie’s left breast.
They were coping brilliantly with a forest of flowers being sent by well wishers. “They’re lovely,” said Mindy, and then, after a pause . . . “Do you think anyone will send cash donations?” Outside, in the real world, one internet site had raised £4,000 for the air ambulance that had saved Richard’s life. Sky News was deluged with thousands of goodwill messages. The Sun received messages from all over the world.
And there was some hope. While James was leaning over, whispering to our bashed-up friend, Mindy started to stroke his hair and I noticed the hamster’s heart rate had shot up from 60 to 75 beats per minute.
“Christ, James. He thinks you’re doing the stroking,” I yelled.
Quickly, the heart beat settled down again. Then came the moment when I said: “The reason you’re here mate is because you’re a c**p driver.”
And he smiled.
I knew then that he was going to pull through. And God it was a relief.
You can never tell after a brain injury what long-term implications there might be. He might have no sense of taste, or double vision. His teeth may go brown. Or he may be absolutely fine.
The only thing I knew was this: he was going to live.
And the next day after he said, “Hello C**kface” to James May, it looked like he might just win back everything else as well.
You’d think that the joyous news would silence the vultures circling the crash site since the accident, rejoicing in the fact that Top Gear had finally been taught its lesson that speed kills.
Somehow I doubt it though. The campaign to have us taken off the air — sparked curiously, by the BBC’s own news website — will now be ramped up, fuelled by the environmentalists and spearheaded by muddle-headed road safety campaigners.
LS's Tip of the week
ESSENTIAL OILS aren't essential unless you're an engine, a gearbox or a twat
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2006 07:19PM by LS..
Awesome column.
nice read.
i heard that the new series of TG will be delayed, but will be on.
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
i heard that the new series of TG will be delayed, but will be on.
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
noticed in the radio times is said top gear was meant to me on last night at 8 on bbc 3 but wasn't, obviously due to the incident
[en-gb.facebook.com]
[en-gb.facebook.com]
yeah, also noticed that since the accident, no Brainiac or Top Gear episodes have been on at all, when normally there are a few TG's on sky channels every day. just yesterday after the news he is recovering did they show old Brainiac's again.
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael
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