For over 20 years, Richard Hammond has made a fine career as one of the top presenters of automotive entertainment. Part of the trio that made Top Gear and The Grand Tour so entertaining to watch, he embarked on epic journeys and drove a collection of rare, exotic, and sometimes odd machinery. He also crashed many of those same rare, exotic, and odd machines, regardless of if they had two wheels, four wheels, or no wheels.
To be fair, it's not crashing if you're playing a sport as he did early on in a Toyota Aygo. It also shouldn't count if you're tethered to another car or if another person remotely operates your vehicle. Even so, there are plenty of examples of Hammond crashing, rolling over, or obliterating objects in an assortment of cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, boats, buses, and ditch diggers.
Briefly, we see the infamous hill climb where Hammond oversteers a Rimac Concept One, sending the million-dollar prototype backward down an incline, where it lands upside down and catches fire. He's quick to credit Rimac for the safety cell of the car before quipping, "I think he still owes me as a test driver. That was a big test."
Watching Hammond's high jinks, you have to wonder how on earth anyone would trust him behind the wheel of anything motorized. It might be safer for him to stick to riding a bicycle, but he's crashed those too. It's a wonder his wife lets him go outside without a helmet.
It's not all fun and games, as Hammond notes, he's suffered numerous injuries, including a broken leg and a brain injury from his Vampire jet dragster crash. He admits he still suffers neck and back pain before adding, "You don't want to hear about my medical problems, do you?"
Even so, the video highlights two things about Richard Hammond. First, he's a good sport about his unscripted mishaps, some of which look seriously scary. But he also comes across as a genuinely engaging person. As The Grand Tour reportedly comes to an end, hopefully, we'll see more highlights of his career as well as his current endeavors.
