Jeremy Clarkson has admitted that he thought long time pal and co-host Richard Hammond had died, after he was involved in a terrifying car crash in Switzerland over the weekend.
The TV stars were filming for their Amazon Prime series Grand Tour, when Richard’s electric supercar crashed and burst into flames – which left him with a broken leg.
However, it appears the show’s cast and crew were expecting something much more sinister – as they had no idea whether Richard had escaped from the car on time.
Writing on Drivetribe, Jeremy Clarkson said, “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.”
Jeremy told how he arrived at the crash site and initially thought someone else had been involved in the crash.
“I arrived maybe 30 seconds later and leaped out to see an inferno raging, maybe a quarter of a mile away, at the bottom of a hill.
“It was obvious from the skid marks what had happened. He’d lost it somehow on the final bend after the finishing line and had plummeted down one bank onto a road lower down the hill, which had caused his car to flip.
“The big question was: had he managed to get out. No-one knew,” he recalled.
It soon dawned on Jeremy that his friend Richard was the driver, and he recounted feeling a “coldness” and his “knees turning to jelly”.
“Video exclusive: I’m not dead” https://t.co/8oyeBCkprv via @drivetribes
— Richard Hammond (@RichardHammond) June 11, 2017
“I was joined at this point by James [May] who’d arrived on the scene just before me in his Honda NSX. He was in a right old state, his arms waving frantically, his eyes wide. ‘Hammond’s in there,’ he was screaming.”
“Then came news from a nearby marshal that he wasn’t,” Jeremy said. “That he’d got out before the fire started. And that ‘his body’ – that’s what they said – was behind a screen at the bottom of the hill.
“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.”
The show’s security advisor then discovered that Richard had escaped the blaze with just a broken leg – and Jeremy described his pal as a “lucky sod”.
Richard’s terrifying crash comes just 11 years after he suffered life-threatening head injuries while filming for BBC’s Top Gear back in 2006.
The TV star was in a coma for two weeks following the high-speed crash, but thankfully he made a full recovery.
