Richard Hammond — BBC Top Gear and Amazon Grand Tour presenter, founder of DriveTribe, known for surviving a near-fatal high-speed jet-dragster crash in 2006.
The gist
Richard Hammond joins Steven Bartlett to trace his path from a modest Birmingham upbringing into broadcasting, framing his drive as compensation for being a small kid who needed to be noticed. He reflects on whether success is born of insecurity and luck, and on the danger that the people most desperate for fame are least equipped to handle it. The heart of the conversation is his 2006 crash at nearly 320mph filming Top Gear, the frontal-lobe brain injury, post-traumatic amnesia, depression and his wife Mindy shouting him out of a coma. He discusses health anxiety and his fear of getting an MRI, the value of men opening up, and how memory and mortality have reshaped his outlook. He closes on family, regrets about being absent, and the advice to follow your passion while you still can.
Big reveals
- Hammond's instinct during the crash was that there was no fear, just an answer to the lifelong question of when he would die: 'oh it's now'.
- He suffered post-traumatic amnesia with roughly a one-minute memory and would re-read the same newspaper several times a day.
- Doctors told Mindy they thought they were losing him, and she shouted and swore at him to not dare die while he was in the coma.
- In a morphine dream during the coma he walked up a hill toward a tree, sensing he was 'in trouble' for carrying on, which he ties to Mindy's anger reaching him.
- He was warned a frontal-lobe injury could raise his propensity for obsession, compulsion, depression and paranoia, and he experienced all of them.
- He still worries about his long-term memory and a possible bleed risk, but has been too scared to get the MRI scan he knows he needs.
- He resigned from Renault twice in one week, in tears, before finally leaving to pursue motoring TV.
Things worth remembering
- Hammond was thrown out of sixth form not for anything dramatic but for being an irritant and not focusing.
- He says he dented his brain crashing into the ground at 320mph, calling it 'short bloke all over'.
- An early Top Gear team rule was real-world cars people actually buy: no supercars, no foreign travel, which they quickly abandoned.
- He performed in front of 60,000 people at the Polish National Stadium in Warsaw during the live shows.
- His jet-propelled dragster had no speedometer because he knew chasing speeds would be dangerous; the front tyre delaminated at nearly 320mph.
- Bartlett cites that loneliness is considered worse than smoking 20 cigarettes a day and can cut life expectancy by 10 years.
- Doctors called memory anxiety after brain injury 'lost key syndrome', where patients panic over ordinary forgetfulness.
- His daughter Willow noted horses evolved to mask pain because, as herd animals, showing weakness means death.