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Hammond and Rimac Discuss the Crash

By now we’ve all seen the footage of the monumental crash that The Grand Tour’s Richard Hammond had while driving a Rimac 1 Concept at a Hill Climb event in Switzerland. Now, you can watch the man himself, and the man who made the car discussing exactly what happened.

If this half hour video, available exclusively on Drive Tribe, proves nothing else, it certainly proves that Richard Hammond is a very good-natured and entertaining man. To be fair, he has a very interesting story to tell, but he tells it well and with a smile.

That he’s around at all to tell it is kind of miraculous and, according to Hammond, a testament to the strength of the car. But as he was heading off track he says “there was a moment of dread—‘Oh God, I’m going to die.”

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve also seen some of Hammond’s recovery process—he’s improved his own crutches, and added holsters for them to his boomer buggy—but all things considered, the host got away reasonably unscathed. As his daughter put it, “Dad, you look like you’ve fallen on your knee in the playground.”

And it’s very fortunate that he didn’t lose consciousness since the car caught fire. Mate Rimac, while he reminds us that some supercars catch fire when they haven’t been launched off a Swiss mountain at great speeds, he recognizes that the fire is a big problem that must be taken care of.

Before it did that, Hammond says he loved the car. “It was breathtaking, and it felt genuinely futuristic and modern,” he says.

Near the end of the video, there’s a bit more disagreement between the two, clearly very friendly men. Before the car went off the road, the back end swung around on Hammond, something he said he couldn’t provoke the car to do in other situations.

So they go over the data. Hammond had done three runs of the hill climb before his accident, and on every one his speed was about 30 km/h (~20 mph) lower than on the corner he crashed. According to Rimac, the speed and the input were asking too much of the torque vectoring system, which tried to get him pointed up the hill. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough tarmac to align his direction of travel with his direction.

“Look, I crashed,” concludes Hammond. “That’s what happened.

It’s a fascinating video well worth a watch, and it sounds like the whole event will be covered on the Grand Tour, so look forward to that, whenever it comes.

The post Hammond and Rimac Discuss the Crash appeared first on VWVortex.



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