There's no real reason why Richard Hammond should not have died in September 2006.

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300 mph on four wheels is, well, ffast. And no that's not a typo, the first "f" is an expletive.

 

Have you ever gone 300? I haven't. In fact anything much past 120 kinda gets my toes curling up instinctively and easing my foot off the loud pedal headed back to something less blurry-making.

 

Yes-yes, that's on the public road. Yes, put it on a clear track and a known-by-the-pebble surface, and with all the support stuff and more every ten feet, then it is a different story. Yes I know the arguments.

 

And of course they are correct. 

 

But all the same, 300!

 

Five-mile gentle curves become hairpins, smooth becomes speed-humps, "twitch" becomes "airborne", and every third unexpected sneeze becomes death and you have already sneezed twice.

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250 then?

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200?

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Today's offerings make 200 the new Ton, and of course with technology now engineering-out everything tricky apart from the driver, it is about as safe as you can get it.

 

Which of course is a state of perfection while it is in the showroom, but the second a carbon life form slots in to the equation all safety goes out of the window. You can't design-out accidents, and until you can the safety-absolute is only ever at 100 or at zero, nothing else.

 

All the same, scale-shift makes some positive contributions and so 200 is possible in comparative safety in a number of modern motor cars.

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But would you want to do over half as much again in one, even with all the Tech on the planet, when even before considering the car itself you need every single external aspect - surface, weather, wildlife and more - to be absolutely perfect and perfectly constant until you say otherwise because you certainly can't  be?

 

300 is a fully loaded gun. The only variable is whether you somehow accidentally jerk the trigger, or someone or something does it for you. At least with Russian Roulette you've a five-out-of-six shot at making it alive.

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But Hammond wasn't in a current-evolution car with all the bells and whistles that can fairly effortlessly give you the 200-thrill on tap pretty much any time you ask it to and give it somewhere to try.

 

No he was driving, well just pointing really, a one- or two-shot machine, effectively strapped to the front of a rocket that is completely out of its depth, or it's heighth, on land.

 

And the only directional control is via those magnificently engineered and ridiculously expensive front pramwheels that regardless of all of that Tech input still have barely a couple of inches of someone else's rubber giving them any hope of pointing and correcting it.

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I mean, how would you like its equivalent skinnys on one of today's superluxosportytourerbarges at even *just* 200?

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I guess if the rocket was on rails and not on wheels, and thereby doing away with a need for steering input, that would help an awful lot. But then, in the Spirit Of Man arena 300 in safety as a passenger doesn't stack up one jot against 300 as a driver who *did* it.

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Which brings things back to reality. 

 

God knows how Hammond didn't die. In fact I'm not entirely sure even He could be certain how.

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You've seen those horrific end-over-end flips and twists and turns and bounces and more in F1?

 

Okay then, F1 cars are generally around 17 feet long and in those crashes tend to be doing at best the high end of 200 going-in, and sometimes less. 

 

In comparison The Vampire is 30 feet long and went in to rolls and spins and a couple of awkward flips and more off a 280 start ...  and then also just crunched and thudded, and slid inverted at crazy-speed until gouge-friction brought everything to a stop.

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Sensible to be there in the first place? Personally I think Quentin Wilson has it pretty-well right when he said that he feared that Richard Hammond's "indefatigable energy" might have been the reason that he "overstepped the mark". Master of understatement, our Quentin.

 

But I think that's polite-speak for 'Spirit Of Man', though others have also gone with "stupid" and "selfishly inconsiderate" which I must admit are very easy to agree with sometimes.

 

But enough.

 

He's around still and without a scratch, externally anyway.

 

I guess give thanks for a safety pod and a small person cinched extremely hard in to it, a small person who broke only his brain - which he did rather a lot! - but otherwise not even a fingernail. 

 

Lucky? No.

 

Fortunate? For sure!

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Onward!

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