(Image: Press Association)
Richard Hammond has revealed why he turned down an offer from the BBC to continue Top Gear after Jeremy Clarkson was sacked from the show.
Hammond, 56, said he and fellow Top Gear host James May would have had a "pretty savage time" going on without Clarkson, after he was dropped from the show for assaulting a TV producer at the Simonstone Hall hotel in the Yorkshire Dales.
Hammond, who grew up in North Yorkshire, told the High Performance podcast Top Gear’s success "only happened because we were all together".
"I couldn’t have done that on my own," he said. "So no, we had to stick together."
"It [Top Gear] needed all of us," he added, "it really did."
Without Clarkson, Hammond said Top Gear would have lost "some of the chaos, lunacy – a lot of ideas are not physically possible, leave alone legal. So the team had to go through them."
Elsewhere in the interview, Hammond said the brain injury he sustained in a crash at the former RAF Elvington airbase, near York, in 2006 is "with me forever".
The presenter crashed a jet-powered dragster called Vampire at nearly 320mph while filming for Top Gear in Elvington 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.
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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 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."