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He signed autographs for the staff and told them he felt all right and was ‘much better’.

He told me he couldn’t remember the accident clearly – except that he’d been fighting something – reaching for something maybe – when the car rolled. He desperately wanted to know if he had done it right on the day, or whether he had just cocked things up and risked never seeing his family again.

We ambled across to the HSE building and met some gentlemen in suits. They escorted us to a small meeting room with a white board and a laptop containing all the data from Vampire’s black box.

We proceeded to run through the same old questions about Richard’s preparation and the build-up to the shoot. Richard calmly replied that he had felt prepared, he couldn’t speak highly enough of the rescue crew that saved his life, that the accident just came out of nowhere. He didn’t believe there was anything he could have done to avoid it.

I was itching to get hold of the data. I couldn’t see the screen. Some photos appeared on the desk and I pulled them across. All I wanted to know was whether Richard had reacted fast enough in the crisis. If I knew that his actions had been true, it meant that we’d armed him with a fighting chance. I needed to see that he’d pulled his parachute.

I surveyed the first image of the wrecked machine, lying on its side on the shredded field. Hanging out of their pods were the telltale white strands and the limp remains of the parachute.

The second photo was of the cockpit. The position of the thrust levers confirmed that he’d been fighting to reach the thrust levers to deploy his chute. What a fighter. He had done it right.

The telemetry recorded the speed and G-forces, and the HSE guys were doing their best to interpret them by the letter. I was keen to take my own view.

Richard was bombing down the straight when he felt the first unusual tug at the steering. Just 0.4 of a second later, the front right tyre exploded, affirmed by a drop in the car’s ride height. What impressed me was that before the tyre blew, his speed trace was already dropping. It suggested that Richard had already lifted his foot to cut thrust.

BANG. The tyre exploded.

Subsequent footage revealed that a blister had formed during the penultimate run, perhaps due to the extra forces exerted by the surface camber.

As the rubber flew apart it exposed the metal rim of the front right wheel, which nose-dived, lifting the rear left wheel into the air. That sent him sideways and hard right. Hammo applied intuitive counter-steering with his hands and applied the brake with his foot, registering as a longitudinal G-force. As the machine turned into the airstream it slewed across the runway at an acute angle. Vapour trails formed around the bodywork’s leading edges. Less than a second had passed.

Richard began to experience lateral G-forces beyond those of fighter pilots engaged in a dogfight. He ditched the steering and reached for the thrust levers. Exponential forces of air density flooded the cockpit as it jolted, rotated and flipped. Somehow, he grabbed the levers and pulled them down. The chute deployed but collapsed before it could arrest his speed.

The impact with the ground came from behind; the earth hammered through the roll cage and Richard’s helmet absorbed the brunt of the blow. Sid Watkins, the renowned F1 neurosurgeon, believed that had it not been for the quality of his headgear, Hammo would have bought the farm.

HSE’s report concluded: ‘As RH sat in Vampire’s cab there was signifi-cant clearance between the rollover cage and the top of his crash helmet.’ It was a polite way of saying Hamster was on the short side, another factor that reduced the blow to his swede. I wondered if I would have been so ‘lucky’.

HSE decided that no one would face a legal charge for the incident and they gave us some spiel about how ‘Safety Management Systems’ and risk assessments could have saved the planet. I was tempted to ask where ‘Health and Safety’ stood on natural