Jeremy Clarkson on speeding

Plainly, as he crested the blind brow, the young man was driving too quickly. So when he found the road ahead blocked by a stationary lorry, he didn’t have anything like enough space to pull up.

Planks and scaffolding poles overhanging the rear of the truck smashed through the windscreen of his car, breaking most of his ribs. And, meanwhile, the whole dashboard was pushed back into his legs, popping both his knee caps. The young man was in a bad way.

Shortly after the ambulance had taken him off to hospital, his girlfriend arrived at the scene, and was told by a farmer leaning on a nearby gate, “Reckon he’s a goner”. This, she found upsetting because they were due to get married in just two weeks’ time.

What had caused this young man to drive so quickly and so recklessly, when he had so much to live for?

Well, if you believe some of the reports in some of Britain’s left-leaning media since Richard Hammond’s accident, you’d imagine that he’d watched Top Gear the previous evening, and had been influenced in some way by the show.

Hmmm. Unlikely, since the young man I’m talking about was my dad. And the crash in question happened nearly 50 years ago, long before the lurid power slide was part of your televisual backdrop on a Sunday night.

So, if he hadn’t seen Top Gear, what could possibly have inspired him, and countless others just like him, to drive so fast?

Well, recent official research into car accidents has revealed that a third of all those injured and killed on the roads are young men, aged in a startlingly narrow band from 17 and 19. Drowning in testosterone, and filled with a youthful sense of immortality, they career about in their Saxos and their Novas, crashing into just about everything that doesn’t move.

This was my dad’s problem. And it was mine too. A mere 35 hours after passing my driving test, aged 17 and a bit, and not under the influence of Top Gear in any way, I plunged off the edge of a bleak road in the Yorkshire Dales and into some unimpressed sheep.

So far this year, six people have rolled noisily into my paddock. One was a middle-aged chap in a van. One was a school teacher. And four were young men who had two other young men in the car at the time.

Being 17 is dangerous. It always has been. I dare say that in the days of old, 17-year olds were reckless on their horses. The fact is, you simply can’t make a 17-year old see sense.

Does anyone really and honestly believe that if Top Gear devoted its single hour on BBC2 each week to ramming home the dangers of driving badly, it would make any difference? I sincerely doubt it. Seventeen-year olds would still be out there, running into trees, lamp-posts, bus shelters and ordinary innocent people like you coming the other way.

Aha, say the detractors, but Top Gear actively encourages speeding.

Truth be told, we don’t any more. Not really.  In the last series, we went caravanning, we drove some amphibious cars across a reservoir, we built a Caterham in a garage, roadied for The Who and built a convertible people carrier. None of these items had anything whatsoever to do with recklessness or speed.

And in the series currently sitting on the shelves waiting for Richard to be better, we have tested tractors, built our own stretched limos, and repaired a stretch of road in Warwickshire. Again. No speed stuff there.

When we do report on a supercar, it’s almost always from on our own test track which is about as far removed from the B4568 as James Bond is from the real world of espionage. And, in my opinion, just as likely to cause car crashes as 007 is to cause drive-by shootings in Nottingham.

Of course, there are plenty of people out there who disagree. Writing about Richard’s accident, Johann Hari said in The Independent recently  ‘Speeding is one of the biggest killers in Britain’. What? More than heart disease? And Neil ‘rent-a-soundbite’ Lyndon was paid some money to argue much the same thing in the Daily Mail.

Radio 4, I’m told, ran a piece where negative reporting of Richard’s accident was intercut with moving details of some poor chap who’d been killed by a reckless youngster.

Meanwhile, the government’s road safety minister, Stephen Ladyman, has been dropped from some anti-speeding campaign or other because he said he was ‘distressed’ to hear that Top Gear might be axed.

There seems to be a belief among those of a Guardian persuasion – and they’re the ones in charge these days – that with more speed cameras, and no television motoring shows, the death toll on the road could be reduced from 3,200 a year to zero. But that simply isn’t possible. Even if there was a blanket nationwide speed limit of 20, there would still be 28 million vehicles passing within a few feet of one another at a closing speed of 40. People would still die. It is the law of both probability and averages.

And anyway, it now transpires that speed isn’t the issue at all because just a few days after Neil Lyndon received his cheque for talking nonsense, official figures revealed that excess speed is responsible for just five per cent of death and serious injury on the road.

The government hit back straight away, of course. They have a big speed-camera industry to support. But even they were forced to admit that 66 per cent of accidents have nothing to do with people going too quickly.

There was some debate in the Isle of Man recently about whether there should be speed limits, and the Minister of Transport was unequivocal. “If someone can prove to me that I could save a single life by imposing limits, then I shall do it”. But no one could. So he didn’t.

The facts, then, are clear. A third of accidents are caused by teenagers who don’t really know how to drive yet, and a third by pedestrians who roll out of pubs and fall into the road.

You could ban Top Gear, of course, but I suspect that if you really want to save lives, you would be better off raising the age when you can take a driving test to 19, and erecting barriers between the road and the pavement outside pubs.

Speed is only a very minor factor in all of this, so why, then, has there been such a torrent of criticism of three blokes fooling around in an old aircraft hangar once a week?

You don’t see anyone blaming the plethora of DIY programmes for the huge number of people killed by power tools. So why are they queuing up to blame us for the 150 or so people killed by speed each year on the road?

Well, it’s not really an attack on us, I suspect. It’s just another misguided attack on the middle classes. I mean, if you look at the environmental campaign it’s not aimed at rusty old Ford Orions in Sheffield or fat lazy slobs in Glasgow who can’t be arsed to put loft insulation in their roof space, or recycle their bottles of stout. No, it’s aimed at school-run mums in expensive 4x4s, and people who go on expensive foreign holidays. Environmentalism, in Britain at least, has been hijacked by what we used to call class warriors from the loony left.

And Top Gear is pretty middle class, really. We talk about dinner parties, lament the demise of fox hunting, plainly have no sympathy for Mr Blair, or Mr Cameron’s eco-stance, and then we have the effrontery to report in glowing terms on a car that does 4mpg. In the world of the modern-day media, we’re not just odd. We’re bloody dangerous.

And what’s more, one of us has now had the temerity to be involved in Britain’s fastest-ever car crash – and live.

They’ve always said that speed kills, but  Richard Hammond is living, breathing proof that it ain’t necessarily so.