Jeremy Clarkson has joked Richard Hammond keeps crashing cars because he "can’t see over the steering wheel".
The 57-year-old presenter has poked fun at his ‘Grand Tour’ co-host – who was hospitalised earlier this month following a smash while filming in Switzerland – and claimed his pal is involved in so many accidents, he is beginning to rely on paramedics to help him get changed every day.
In 2006, Richard was left in a coma after a 288mph crash while shooting ‘Top Gear’, and he skidded off a track and into a BMW during an endurance race the following year, while in Italy in 2014, he crashed a Jaguar into a wall, proving to Jeremy that he can’t drive well anywhere.
He wrote in his column for The Sunday Times magazine: "A few years ago Richard Hammond was asked to drive a car down a runway, and somehow he ended up on his head and then in a coma for a few weeks.
"And now, having established he can’t drive in a straight line, he has proved he can’t drive round corners either. All he had to do was drive a small electric car up a Swiss hill, which he managed, but then somehow, on a left-hand bend after the finish line, he lost control, rolled down a bank and ended up in a hospital. Again.
"At this rate he will get to the point where he forgets how to get undressed at night. He’ll put his clothes on in the morning and then assume they will be cut off by paramedics at some point later in the day.
"Seriously, I’m struggling to think of any racetrack in the world that Hammond hasn’t crashed on at some point. At Imola he binned a Noble, at Virginia International Raceway in America it was a Porsche, at Mugello he bent a Jaguar and at Silverstone, in a 24-hour race, he doomed our efforts in the middle of the night by stuffing a BMW into pretty much everything that was solid.
"Maybe it’s because he can’t see over the steering wheel. Who knows?"
Richard, 47, is on the road to recovery with just a fractured knee following his recent crash and Jeremy admitted he is more upset about the fate of the electric supercar his pal flipped over because the vehicle was so "amazing".
He continued: "What troubles me most of all, now that we know he will be OK, is the charred mess he left at the bottom of the hill in Switzerland.
"It had started out that morning as something called the Rimac Concept One. And, frankly, it was amazing…
"I had only a brief time behind the wheel and simply could not believe how fast it accelerated. We are not talking here about a car that’s as fast as a Lamborghini Aventador. It’s massively faster than that. It’s faster than anything else I’ve driven, by a huge, huge margin…
"Hammond loved it. He will probably love it even more now he knows you can roll it down a hill at 120mph and still get out before some kind of electrical issue causes it to become an inferno.
"And doubtless we will hear more when he talks about it in the next series of ‘The Grand Tour’. Unless [co-presenter] James May and I have kicked him to death by then."
Jeremy Clarkson mocks Richard Hammond crash
