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RICHARD Hammond has said his brain injury sustained in a crash in York is “with me forever”.
The presenter, 56, crashed a jet-powered dragster called Vampire at nearly 320mph while filming for Top Gear at the former RAF Elvington airbase in 2006.
Although the incident left him with serious head injuries, he recovered and returned to the show in early 2007.
He told the High Performance podcast he fears the brain injury could lead to early onset dementia but he is “too scared” to get tested for the condition.
Asked if he has had the scan to check for early onset dementia, Hammond replied: “No, I’m scared to death to do it. But I absolutely should.
“Because I do lose stuff a lot; I do forget stuff, but that’s probably because I’m 56 and not concentrating.”
Asked why he was scared, Hammond said: “I wouldn’t want to know that’s what was coming, would I? To be fair, if it’s happening, you’re less than aware – but it’s a bloody struggle. Some people are lucky and they’re happy.”
“I’m just selfishly scared. And also I’d feel, oh no, honestly in terms of my daughters, I’m going to let them down – It’s going to be primarily difficult for them.”
Hammond got back in the reconstructed dragster as part of a video for the DriveTribe YouTube channel, which he co-founded with Jeremy Clarkson and James May, in 2022 and described the experience as “genuinely weird”.
He previously told Good Morning Britain: “It came about [because] I had the guys from DriveTribe over at my place and we were trying to plan a look ahead to the year.
“And one of them said, ‘You do know that car has now been restored and rebuilt just down the road from where you live?’ And it seemed too good an opportunity, so we rang them.
“It was all a bit of fun until the moment came – and you can see it on the little video on the platform – and I got in and I did go a bit quiet. It was, ‘Oh, hang on’.
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“It’s weird. I remember the last time I got into this, but I don’t remember the last time I got out of it. So technically I must still be in it. It was a strange feeling.”
Hammond, who now presents Richard Hammond’s Workshop on Discovery Plus, was brought up in North Yorkshire and left Ripon Grammar School in the middle of his A levels before studying visual arts at Harrogate.
His first broadcasts emanated on BBC Radio York. “It took me about a week just to put one piece together,” Hammond once told an interviewer. “And I only got paid about £10, so I worked part-time in a bookshop and a petrol station and collected chicken eggs on a farm.”