Smash hit

He may not have broken a bone, or sustained even so much as a graze in the crash, but while rolling over it’s likely he’d been subjected to mountainous G forces. His brain would have weighed something in the order of 70 stone, and it was being tossed about inside his skull at 300 revs per minute. And all the while his head was being bashed endlessly into the bars of the car’s protective roll cage.

()Imagine being in a washing machine on its final cycle, while being attacked by 30 burly men with pile drivers.

The problem when your brain starts to swell is that it can’t grow outwards because of the skull, so it has to go down; into the spinal column. If that had happened to Richard, at best, he’d have become a drooling vegetable.

As I left the restaurant I had another call from Wilman, who was caning his Golf GTI up the M1. “The doctors say he’s critical,” he said.

I couldn’t sleep. Hammond is an irritating little mutant, consumed by a need to be on every single television programme on every single channel on every single day — something he damn nearly achieved last year with the 5 O’Clock Show, Should I Worry About Sausages, his Search for the Holy Grail, Petrolheads, Top Gear, Cruft’s, Brainiac, and God knows what else.

However, I like him enormously. He has a phenomenally fast wit and a wonderful turn of phrase. He came with his wife Mindy and his two children Izzy and Willow to stay at our holiday cottage this summer and I saw another side to him. A happy side. A man who’d just learnt that actually the cure for being 5ft 6in is not to be on television all the time.

It turned out that he’s an accomplished musician, a fine horseman, that he’s pretty well read and that he can paint. I have one of his pictures and in a local pub it would fetch, ooh, at least £6.99.

SO what was this sane, funny family man doing in a 370mph jet car?

Well, contrary to reports that he was put there by ratings-hungry producers, it was his idea. He wanted to know what it would be like to go really fast. And I know exactly why.

If he’d been interested in flowers and vegetables since a young age, he might very well now be standing in a pair of wellingtons on Gardeners’ World, talking about compost. But he isn’t interested in compost — he’s interested in speed.

When I was his age, I made a television series called Extreme Machines. Mostly, this involved being upside down, at 750mph, while vomiting. But there were quieter times like when I did the standing quarter on a snowmobile on a frozen river in Sweden in seven seconds. Or when an airboat flipped at 100mph, hurling me into an alligator-infested swamp.

However, I would not have driven the jet car. Neither would James May, who gets giddy if he runs. That’s because he’s weird and I’m too old and too fat and I have too many children these days to put myself voluntarily in harm’s way.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Times Christmas appeal: Letter from the Editor
• Conferences — what a waste of money
• Schools supremo learns a painful lesson