RICHARD HAMMOND, the Top Gear presenter who returned to the show four months after crashing at 288mph, has given a stark account of the lingering effects of brain injury caused by his jet car accident.

Eighteen months after the crash in which he was trapped inside a somersaulting car, he is still prone to memory losses, has emotional difficulties and has damaged the part of his brain that controls spatial awareness.

He returned to the BBC show in January 2007 after five weeks in hospital, but concedes that it was “much too early” and says he remembers little of the television series he rejoined: “It’s been a bloody long journey and it’s still going.

“I spent a year recovering and I’m still on the mend. All the swelling has gone down, it’s as mended as it’s likely to be, it seems to be more a case of rewiring itself.

“I’m a hell of a lot more fixed than I was but every time something happens, if I make an odd decision (which can happen), you realise how broken you were.

“I damaged all the complicated bits of the brain to do with processing and emotional controls. I damaged the part of the brain to do with spatial awareness. Sometimes I have trouble parking. My memory is a lot better but the other day I forgot the pin numbers to all my cards.”

He added: “I thought I was better when I went back to work but now I don’t remember going back.”

Hammond, nicknamed the Hamster by Jeremy Clarkson and James May, his Top Gear co-presenters, crashed at a disused air-field in Yorkshire while filming for the programme in September 2006. Telemetry from the car showed he had previously reached 314mph in the jet-powered dragster – an unofficial British land-speed record.

The car overturned when a tyre burst at 288mph. Hammond was airlifted to hospital and at first it was unclear whether he would live.

He concedes that his recovery was not as straightforward as it appeared. He talks of having struggled “mortally with depression” and still speaks regularly to his psychiatrist: “I was really having a bloody hard time. I had to evolve new strategies for coping. When I did the 24-hour race for Top Gear in September I was scared and nervous but it was making me argumentative, angry, nervous about me, thinking I wasn’t good enough for the job, feeling awful.”

Hammond lives in Gloucestershire with his wife Amanda, known as Mindy, and their two daughters, Isabella, 7, and Willow, 4. Top Gear, which will return to BBC2 in the summer, regularly attracts audiences of 8m and is shown in more than 20 countries around the world.

Hammond, who joined the programme in 2002, has also presented Crufts dog show and filled in for Terry Wogan on Radio 2, but cars remain his first love. “The great thing about Top Gear is that you get the sense we’d still be doing it even if they weren’t filming,” he said. “There is a lot of piss-taking but we’re all best friends and we love each other dearly – don’t tell Clarkson I said that, he’ll punch me next time he sees me.”

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