Following his horrific 320mph car incident in 2006, Richard Hammond has said he is terrified of being diagnosed with dementia.
The former Top Gear host was shooting a stunt for the BBC programme at York’s Elvington airport when one of the Vampire jet car’s tyres broke, causing the vehicle to spin out of control, putting Richard in a coma and causing a frontal lobe brain damage.
‘I worry about my memory because it’s not amazing,’ he stated on the Diary Of A CEO podcast. I can still read and deliver a script, but my long-term memory isn’t great.
‘Sometimes I have to write things down and work hard to recall them. I’m concerned since it may be due to my age or the beginning of something worse. Yes, I do. I should probably dig into it and find out, because I am curious.’
Steven Bartlett, the podcast’s presenter, asked the 53-year-old singer whether he was “scared of finding out,” and he said he is.
‘I am because it was a bleed on the front. It could mean there is an increased risk. I need to find out. I’ve been too scared to do it. I need to do it,’ he confessed.
‘Weirdly on the way here, I had to stop off for a medical for a production. They ask “Have you been involved in any accidents?” I’m like “Woooah! Can I have another piece of paper please?”
‘I need to book myself in for one of those mid-life MOTs and check everything. I wanted to ask them to check there is nothing going awry up here [pointing to his head]. But I chickened out. Didn’t.
‘That means I probably need an MRI scan but at 53, your memory does start to get a bit… they call it lost key syndrome. I am quite forgetful, generally thinking about something else, the next thing and therefore I do drop the ball, I forget stuff a lot. That’s just me. That’s who I am.’
The crash saw him come ‘remarkably close to death’ and left him suffering from depression in the wake of the accident, while he has ‘no recollection’ of the incident due to the frontal lobe bleed.
‘I have no recollection because there was the frontal lobe bleed. I was just decelerating upside down, using my head as a brake, which isn’t good for you,’ he said.


‘Mindy. [his wife], was told by the doctors that a frontal brain lobe injury would possibly lead to me having a greater propensity for obsessive compulsion and depression and paranoia.
‘Mindy was like, “You didn’t meet him before the crash, did you?” which is quite funny to be fair. I think I did suffer a bit, I suffered all of those things to a degree. Some of them were really weird moments and I still get an echo of it.’
Richard was taken to a hospital in Switzerland six years ago following a second collision, this time while filming for Amazon’s The Grand Tour.
‘It’s not surprising that we don’t want to face it. I do practice a bit of mindfulness and as you get older, talking about it makes it easier. You don’t have to imagine a world without you in it because you wont be in it,’ he candidly explained. ‘I had very bad post traumatic amnesia for weeks.
‘Like a one-minute memory. Mindy my wife said I was the nicest I had ever been. Lovely apparently. I was perfectly happy reading the same newspaper every single day several times a day until Mindy took it away because she was sick of seeing me read it.
‘If someone is in that confused state for whatever reason, if they are happy, they are happy. All you’ve got to do is cope to support them in that. It doesn’t matter if they cant remember who you are. And I was. ‘