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I turned back to Colin and thanked him. I said I’d speak to the director, but that, on reflection, I thought he shouldn’t allow cameras to be mounted inside the cockpit.

‘One last thing,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to do the first run tomorrow.’

I emailed my report before heading to Dunsfold the following morning to film the new Jaguar XKR with Jezza. Richard arrived at Elvington and got to grips with his shoot. It was like a scene out of Sliding Doors.

Richard met up with Colin and familiarised himself with the procedures. Colin banged in the first run of the day, as he had promised. Rich-ard’s early runs were textbook as he gradually built up his speeds using standard thrust. He practised the emergency shutdown drills before putting in a maximum speed afterburner run, during which he howled down the runway at 314mph. Space hoppers.

He was unperturbed by the punch in the back as the car bolted from its mark, unfazed by how much steering force he had to apply to keep it pointed straight, resolute in the face of mind-bending speed. As he popped the parachute at the end of that run, his body slammed into the five-point harness at twelve times its normal weight.

Richard climbed aboard Vampire for his final run, lucky number seven. She guzzled a load of fuel as he slipped on his blue Sparco driving gloves one more time. The crew lit his inferno. An ear-splitting roar grew into a shriek as he reached maximum rpm. He reached across the blurred, throbbing steering controls and lit the afterburner.

Richard’s neck absorbed the doubling weight of his head and helmet as he shot down the runway as a yellow streak towards the camera crew. Molecules of air blasted his helmet and shook it violently as he kept an eye on the horizon and a firm grip at the helm, steering hard to the left to drive straight.

At 288mph, Richard noticed the car pulling even more than usual. Just half a second later, the time it takes to blink, he was in the middle of a colossal accident and fighting for his life.

At Dunsfold the Jag was spinning its wheels in fourth and producing enough smoke to fill a pop concert. The good light meant we finished a little after 5pm. That was when news was filtering in via the camera crews that there had been an accident at Elvington.

I remembered standing on the rugby pitch at school next to one of my pals. A typical redhead, his wiry frame punched well above his weight. With a ball in hand he was unstoppable; he would take anyone on. He lay on the ground in front of me as motionless as a corpse. My initial shock turned to horror as his head injury caused him to convulse until the paramedics loaded him into their wagon and took him away. The hours that followed felt like days.

Russell tugged me back into the present. ‘Do you think it’s serious, Ben?’

‘Of course it’s fucking serious,’ I snapped. ‘He was doing 300 miles an hour.’

When we came to investigate the accident with the Health and Safety Executive, I met a spaced-out Hammond near a café in Bristol. He’d lost some weight and looked understandably fragile.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since his accident. I had wanted to badly. I was told to stay clear of the hospital because my appearance would have stoked the media frenzy that was already hard to control. The presenters and many of the TG team had gone to see him and show their support. Mindy, Richard’s ebullient wife, was at his bedside throughout, enduring the agony of watching her husband pass in and out of consciousness. Not knowing if he would slip away for good.

In the end I’d gone anyway, to smuggle him some junk food – chocolate, Coke, crisps – that Mindy told me he was desperate for. But I couldn’t see him.

Now he was staring peacefully out across the docks. Part of me expected him to be angry or cold towards me, but seeing him alive was all that mattered.

‘Hey, mate,’ he said a fraction slower than usual. ‘I think I got here a bit early.’

We stopped for a coffee at the waterside and I couldn’t escape the feeling that he