Jeremy Clarkson: Richard Hammond is a ‘lucky sod’
JEREMY CLARKSON was convinced his Grand Tour co-star was dead after his car burst into flames during filming.
Richard Hammond was involved in a crash at the weekend, but managed to climb out before the fire, escaping without serious injury.
But Clarkson has recounted, on Drive Tribe, how he initially believed his fellow presenter must be dead.
‘I don’t know what went wrong. Hopefully, when he comes out of surgery and is feeling up to it, he will be able to tell us. What I do know is that I genuinely thought he was dead,’ he writes.
Clarkson also describes the moment he realised it was Hammond not the test driver who’d had an ‘off’.
‘As I stood there, waiting for news, it dawned on me that the burning car was not yellow, as the Aventador was. It was white. Hammond’s Rimac had been white,’ he writes.
‘And I can feel it now; the coldness. My knees turning to jelly. It was Hammond who’d crashed.’
Due to the confusion, Hammond’s ‘body’ was described as being behind a screen at the bottom of the hill, leading Clarkson and his co-star James May to fear the worst.
‘I could see the screen. I could see the paramedics behind it. I couldn’t see Hammond. I didn’t want to see him. Not after a crash that big,’ writes Clarkson.
Fortunately, the show’s security man, who is ‘made of sterner stuff’, went down to take a look and put them out of their misery.
‘I saw him lift his walky talky and I heard him say, “It’s all right fellas. He winked at me,” Clarkson writes.
The Grand Tour presenter finishes up by calling Hammond a ‘lucky sod’ and adds that viewers will have to wait for ‘all the details, and who knows, another book’ when he ‘feels up to it’.
Author: Anna Thomson
