Skip to main content

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.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2tXYp23
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bugatti Chiron Won’t Get a Roadster Version

The all-new Bugatti Chiron hypercar will not get a convertible version like its Veyron predecessor did. Speaking to Autocar at the London grand opening of the sole Bugatti showroom in the U.K., marketing boss Stefan Brungs confirmed that the French automaker’s latest hypercar will only be sold in coupe format, with “no roadster or convertible” version in the plans. Brungs also said that the company is only planning on selling the allotted 500 Chirons as standard, so faster variants like a Super Sports version also aren’t likely. This is a very different strategy than the Veyron, which has targa top Grand Sport and Super Sports models, as well as a number of special edition models. The Chiron is set to try to break the world record for fastest car and attempt to beat the Veyron’s record of 268 mph. It is believed that the Chiron will be able to hit 288 mph. Powered by an 8.0-liter W16 engine with 1,500 horsepower and 1,106 pound-feet of torque, it shouldn’t ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...
2 comments
Read more