29 October 2023 , 09:00
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Richard Hammond's patient wife helped nurse him back to health after his devastating 2006 car crash that left him comatose in hospital for two weeks. The motoring journalist and star of Top Gear and Amazon Prime's The Grand Tour, now 53, nearly lost his life when the jet-powered supercar he was racing at 319mph flipped and smashed during filming for the BBC show.
Petrified crew filming at the former RAF Elvington airbase near York raced to get him medical attention, and Richard's life hung in the balance over the next fortnight as doctors tried desperately to repair the damage done to his body. Miraculously he awoke from his coma, but his wife Mindy was shocked when he couldn't recognise her face.
Richard with his wife Mindy and their daughters Izzy and Willow in 2018 (Dave Benett/Getty Images for Longines)"It was disconcerting when, early after the crash, Richard looked at me from his hospital bed and said, 'You're lovely, but you're not my wife'," she told the Telegraph. "When I corrected him, he responded, 'No, you're not my wife, my wife is French'. Indeed, when he was allowed home five weeks later, it became clear that Richard's memory loss was no short-term affliction."
The couple struggled with Richard's mood swings and he became prone to depression because of his brain injury. His short-term memory was affected by the crash and he was unable to retain information for more than 10 seconds. Instead, the pair would have the same conversations over and over again as Richard would lose track and repeat the same sentence.
Even reading the newspaper was a struggle for the driving expert, as he would scan the page time and time again without taking in the information on it. But as his body and brain slowly recovered from the trauma, Mindy said their romance was rekindled and they even fell in love all over again. Richard later revealed in a poignant video how a vivid dream about his wife had brought him back from his coma, and Mindy told the Express how she'd asked staff at his hospital bedside how to help get through to him.
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Mindy Hammond screamed at her husband while he was comatose, and he heard her in his dream (PA)
Richard was able to 'turn back' when he heard Mindy's voice (Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images)“It was a harrowing, horrible time,” she revealed. “The nurse had tried all these observations by prodding him and she was clearly getting nothing. And I remember saying to her ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Because obviously things were going in the wrong direction, she started shouting ‘Richard, Richard’ at him. I said ‘Can I shout at him too?’
“I got really close to his face and shouted: ‘Richard, Richard, squeeze those bloody fingers. You’ve got to come back’. You are hysterical because you just know if you don’t get a response, the slide is starting. I was swearing at him. You would do anything.”
As she squeezed his hand, she noticed his index fingers were making minuscule movements, which were his first sign of consciousness after the crash. "Shortly after that he opened his eyes a fraction, as if he had briefly dipped his head over the parapet. I remember he looked at me for seconds, absolutely blank. He had no idea who I was," she went on.
“I went to the loo and absolutely sobbed because I thought ‘Where are you?’ I thought I actually don’t know what the outcome of this is going to be. I now know people come back from brain injury and look at their life and say ‘I don’t want this’. And look at their wife and think ‘I don’t want her either’! You just don’t know what you will get. I thought, ‘Is he ever going to know who I am’. That was hard."
Richard couldn't recognise his own wife when he finally awoke (Ken McKay/ITV/REX/Shutterstock)Affectionately referring to him an "obstinate little whatsit", Mindy said she had every faith he would pull through, but didn't know how he would be after the crash, when their children Izzy and Willow were just three and six. He later revealed he had been dreaming about his family during his coma while 'walking' through one of his favourite parts of the Lake District.
Mindy explained: “He said ‘You were shouting at me’ and he knew he was in trouble because I don’t normally get cross. To hear me bellowing at him was really unusual and serious. He remembered me shouting and it was an easy route he was walking. It was really hard to ‘come back’. It’s clearly a tremendous effort.
"The only way he could explain it was imagine being paralysed and you are on your stomach and have to grip with your fingers and haul yourself through. I think that’s why when people are in comas and they talk about pulling back, that is literally what you are doing. It is pure grit and determination.” Since his recovery, Richard has become "more patient" and "self-aware", said Mindy, who added that the traumatic crash made them stronger as a couple.
Richard escaped death again when he scrambled from a car crash in 2017 moments before the vehicle burst into flames (PA)But Richard still worries about the long-term effects on his health, especially as he went through another high-speed car accident while filming for The Grand Tour in Switzerland in 2017. His horrified co-stars Jeremy Clarkson and James May were forced to stay back as the £2million supercar he was racing flipped over and burst into flames, not knowing whether their friend and colleague was trapped inside the fiery blaze.
"I can feel it now; the coldness. My knees turning to jelly," Jeremy later wrote on DriveTribe.com. "Then came news from a nearby marshal that he wasn’t [inside]. That he’d got out before the fire started. And that 'his body' – that what they said – was behind a screen at the bottom of the hill.
"I couldn’t see Hammond. I didn’t want to see him. Not after a crash that big. What I do know is that I genuinely thought he was dead." Richard managed to escape the wreckage with a shattered knee and a broken rib, but made a full recovery in Swiss hospital. Six years on, he believes his long-term memory has been affected by the first crash, but is "too scared" to go for medical tests to see if he's at risk of developing other conditions.
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"I have to consciously write memories down and work hard to recall them sometimes," he admitted to Steven Bartlett on The Diary of a CEO podcast in February 2023. "It might be because I'm 53, it might be because I'm working a lot and I'm tired, it might be the onset of something else..." He's also sworn off dangerous stunts, telling the Mirror: "I’ve a beautiful wife and two beautiful daughters. I’m not going to risk leaving them."