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That's the essential difference between us. Hammond is something of a thrill-seeker, and I'm not. The odd lap with the Stig is great fun, I enjoyed trying to max the Bentley Flying Spur in the desert, and I even quite liked the frankly alarming rally-car ride in the bobsleigh-vs-car film Hammond and I made.

I am not, as the other two suggest, completely averse to high speed, it's just that I don't lie awake craving this sort of thing. I suspect he does.

So when I was told that I wouldn't, after all, be driving the jet car, I didn't exactly have a tantrum. I admit I was a bit disappointed, because I quite liked the idea of Captain Slow being the fastest man on Top Gear.

I also thought a jet car would be technically intriguing, since I'm quite interested in jet engines and it would introduce me to a whole new world of truly delectable pre-flight checks.

But when the Vampire became available, I wasn't. So Hammond got the job instead. This sort of thing happens all the time, and it meant that I'd be doing the piece on the performance of the Bugatti Veyron.

And that wouldn't exactly be a three-car diesel group test. And, at the time, it seemed appropriate to do the swap. The Veyron film would require a certain amount of nerdiness, which I'm good at, and in the end it's just a conventional car.

The Vampire is something not many people will ever get to drive, and required someone who would rise to the 'outside-of-the-envelope' moment. That's what Hammond's good at. That's why we freeze him and expose him to electric shocks; push him to the borders of the unknown and then sit back and await his report.

I would have borne the jet-car experience with as much fortitude as I could muster, but Hammond's brain would be awash with whichever chemical it is that makes his eyes go all poppy.

And then the demons were unleashed, and with them a torrent of sanctimonious questions from navel-gazing miserablists who enjoy saying, 'I warned you'. They want to apportion blame - the BBC, to the people who produce Top Gear, to me and Jeremy, to the people who built the car - and cannot accept that Hammond was the victim of that most unpredictable of possible consequences that haunts all human endeavour, and which, were it always considered, would have locked us in the stone age; an accident.

Despite everything I've said above, I've spent enough time with Hammond to know he'd have done everything properly and treated the Vampire drive very, very seriously. I suspect he'd have found that tiresome, but he would have done it. He's feisty and he's up for it, but he's not an idiot.

And just think: if everything had gone to plan, we'd have come back to the studio and applauded Richard Hammond for the size of his balls. Just because it went wrong doesn't mean we should applaud that any less.

Someone has pointed out that 300mph in a jet-powered car doesn't actually achieve anything. So? The ascent of Everest probably didn't advance humankind's lot, but we're still glad that someone did it. And the people who did that were people a bit like Richard Hammond.

This is what makes him good to watch on your television. More importantly, I now realise, it's also what makes him such good company. Get well soon, mate.

Read Jeremy's article