Fuelling Around podcast: Richard Hammond on his new TV show and the injury that put him in a coma

Richard Hammond is the first guest on series five of Adrian Flux’s award-winning podcast Fuelling Around, with the Top Gear legend and television presenter telling hosts Jason Plato and Dave Vitty about his latest TV projects and the brain injury that left him in a coma.

Hammond, 53, is one of the UK’s most recognisable television presenters, having hosted The Grand Tour, Brainiac: Science Abuse and fronted popular car show Top Gear for over 13 years alongside James May and Jeremy Clarkson. In the podcast, he revealed he’s working on a new show that ties in with his business of restoring cars, including the 1952 Alvis which he entered in the Restorer of the year competition.

Elsewhere on the podcast, powered by Adrian Flux, Hammond reveals how he fell out with host and British Touring Car Championship legend, Plato, due to losing out to him in a TV audition for the Channel 4 hit show Driven many years ago.

Richard Hammond on his brain injury after horror accident in 2006

Whilst filming an episode of Top Gear in 2006, Hammond was badly injured in a car accident. The 53-year-old was filming at the RAF Elvington airbase, where he was piloting a jet-powered Vampire dragster, while travelling at 319mph.

Hammond details the injury that left him in a coma to Plato and Vitty: “I’m always very cautious not to make too light of it,” explains Hammond. “I don’t want to go on and on about it, because the last thing I would want is for people to go ‘oh bloody hell, it’s Hammond going on about that accident, just shut up’.

“But I’m very cognisant of the fact that for a lot of people a frontal lobe injury, which is what I received, has a very different outcome. I’ve spoken to loads and loads of people over the course of the years following my injury. I spoke to returning servicemen and women, who’d received their injury because somebody fired a rocket-propelled grenade at their armour personnel carrier.

“I’ve spoken to people who received their injury falling off a ladder, and spoken to people who were mugged. In other words, it doesn’t really matter the context of how you received the injury, the process of recovery is astoundingly similar. But I was lucky.”