http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/north_yorkshire/5365676.stm

Pistonheads have organised a collection for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Charity. The address is http://www.justgiving.com/PHRichardHammond and the current total stands at over £24k!

oh fecking hell

Im in bulgaria and this is the first ive heard of it, really feel for the guy, hope he pulls through, he sorta makes top gear complete and i for one would miss his enthusiasm.

UPDATE

 

Richard Hammond has been moved out of intensive care it just said on the news. So its looking good for the fella

Best wishes for a speedy recovery Hamster. You are incredibly brave.

Apparently, Clarkson was visiting him and said "You're a crap driver" to him and he smiled :)

Does sound like things are looking more promising than yesterday. Hope his recovery continues at a good pace

really glad he is getting better slowly

 

for me he makes the show, really cracks me up :)

 

top bloke

On the news they said that he should not have been in the car as only should be done by trained professionals, does that mean he was driving!?

On the news they said that he should not have been in the car as only should be done by trained professionals, does that mean he was driving!?

I read somewhere that he was a last minute stand in, the

original driver backed out for whatever reason :confused:

Pistonheads have organised a collection for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance Charity. The address is http://www.justgiving.com/PHRichardHammond and the current total stands at over £24k!

 

Ironic really, that ZX Mad was trying to sort out the 300ZX world record attempt to raise funds for a similar organisation.

 

I bet if it was being organised it after such a celebrity accident, people would be a lot more willing to help it happen...

 

Anyway, great news that the Hamster is on the mend, keep chugging round your little wheel fella! :)

On the news they said that he should not have been in the car as only should be done by trained professionals, does that mean he was driving!?

Yes he was. However, they can say what they like on the news but it's only their opinion. Maybe it wasn't all that sensible to do it, but it should be his decision, not some news presenter's :nono: .

I heard that James May was supposed to be doing it but he had a clash of diaries or sommat.

 

Get well soon little fella.

 

Ivan

James M in 300 m.p.h. car? I don't think so. Some idiot asked whether it was time for Top Gear to stop. I suppose if people will stop playing football, rugby, pack in mountain climbing, pot-holing, hang gliding, flying, diving, riding, swimming etc., then that might be a fair question.

Top Gear's Richard Hammond has taken his first steps since his high-speed car accident, according to Jeremy Clarkson.

Sounds promising.

On the news they said that he should not have been in the car as only should be done by trained professionals, does that mean he was driving!?

 

Maybe if he'd done a couple of 30minute lessons and got a laminated certificate in 'jet car driving' then the critics would have been happy?! FFS what training can you do in a jet-car? The guy is a professional driver anyhow, there's not much else you can do is there? I'm sure he got shown enough to feel comfortable. It does my head in that people say he shouldn't have been there in the first place and have the police involved,etc. Its free spirit to have a go at things like this, try to crack the land speed record, go one step furthur etc. Good on him I say, gutted it went wrong. Life life to the full. I'm chuffed to see he's making steps to recovering.

'Richard is winning his fight'

 

 

 

By JEREMY CLARKSON

SEPTEMBER 23, 2006

 

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.

 

 

Top pals ... Richard with Clarkson and

May on day before smash

I know one bloke who has driven it and he said simply: “It was brilliant. Although I did fill my pants.”

 

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.

 

Richard is winning his fight. And now mine begins. To make sure that he has a show to come back to.

Well said JC. :bow:

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..

 

LMAO :rofl:

 

Excellent news!! :hyper:

nice one rich

Loved the Clarkson statement, especially the quotes 'The only good news, so far as I could see, was that his teeth were still as shiny and bright as ever' and James May admitting to being “a bit unmanly” at one point....brilliant! made me laff

Well said JC. :bow:

 

I second that too - it couldn't have been better said :cool:

 

The tree hugging anti-car vegans can all go f#ck themselves :slap:

 

Wishing the HAmster a speedy recovery.....

 

Richard

thats amazing reading! you can picture the scene exactly. lol, and the hair-stroking bit made me PMSL!!! good luck Hamster!

“Christ, James. He thinks you’re doing the stroking,” I yelled.

 

This bit tickeled me!

 

Now they are saying the producers are putting the future of Top Gear in doubt? The suited and booted pin heads are obviously looking at pounds shillings and pence, through insurence?

 

What about the owners of the car, how must they be feeling that someone almost died in their car? Does pounds shillings and pence come into that?

 

And what about the many motor racing deaths and accidents there are each year? Senner, Ratzenburger, to name just 2 who both lost their lives at the same place on the same track. Does that consitute stopping motor racing?

 

Get a life pin heads!! Stop top gear and you can stuff your tv licence!!!!

here's an update from the "InterWeb":

 

LONDON (Reuters) - Television presenter Richard Hammond has revealed he thought he was going to die after his high-speed smash in a jet-powered car last month.

 

 

 

In his first interview since the accident, the "Top Gear" co-presenter talked about the moments after he crashed his Vampire dragster as he accelerated to 288 mph while filming a feature for the BBC show at an RAF airfield near York.

 

 

 

 

 

" I was upside down inhaling a field. My nose and eyes were full of earth. I'd gone ploughing on my head," Hammond told Monday's Daily Mirror.

 

"It was 50/50 what was going to happen. I may have been dead, I may not have woken up."

 

 

 

Hammond, 36, said he lost consciousness shortly afterwards and next remembers waking up in Leeds General Infirmary.

 

 

 

"Doctors use a point system. Fifteen is normal, three is a flatline. I was a three. I was that close to being dead," he said.

 

 

 

The accident left Hammond with serious brain injuries but he said he was now on course to make a full recovery.

 

 

 

However, he said when he emerged from his coma, his mind was like an "office that had been utterly ransacked" and he suffered terrible pain.

 

 

 

His behaviour became childlike and he said he became obsessed with Lego and the card game Top Trumps which he used to get his brain working again.

 

 

 

"I was basically mad as a bag of snakes. I'm sure there were phases when I was utterly bonkers," the popular presenter, nicknamed "Hamster", told the Mirror from a secret location where he is staying with his wife and two children.

 

 

 

He now says he is well enough to return home.

 

 

 

"I'm so bloody lucky I can't believe it," he added.

 

 

 

The crash is being investigated by health and safety officials but Hammond said all safety precautions had been taken with the car.

 

 

 

"I was actually quite good at driving it," he said. "But clearly something went wrong and the day didn't turn out as we planned ... to put it mildly!

Glad to say he's on the mend.

 

My aunt (who has some experience of these things) thought he looked like he was paralyzed down one side in that picture of him after the accident.

 

He must have taken a serious knock on the head - I hope he'll recover fully.

 

A mate of mine crashed a bike at the TT and hit his head quite a few years ago - even now he sometimes thinks he's in a hotel and asks someone randomly where his room is or what time breakfast is.