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That there Hammond jet car
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Looking at the photos here:
(enlarge the piccie of the crashed car)
I notice several things:
1) The car looks largely intact (so not much energy absorbed?)
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It slid and rolled wothout hitting any solid objects. You'd not want
it to break up in that scenario.
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2) The rollover hoop appears to be gone...
3) If that was doing 300MPH, it didn't half stop quick.
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I thought that when I saw the aerial shots
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[snippy]
Whoever coined the phrase, "A picture says more than a thousand words,"
certainly wasn't far off the mark.
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Couldn't have put it better.
However it did make me go back to the picture and study it closer.
I reckon the car was side on, backwards, front wheels hitting first. One big
spin in the air, front wheels down first, with a arse-tit moment at the end
leaving it facing the correct direction. Interestingly, there is a big white
mark at the start of the movement, this could be from a front wheel puncture
and metal to concrete. One wheel is missing from the final picture, could it
be the front wheel came off creating this situation? There is only one front
wheel skid throughout the spin, with lots of white marking where the other
wheel should have been.
That's only 120 words....
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Impressive, but you have *way* too much time on your hands :)
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Of course it wasn't doing 300mph - thats just newspaper hype. The accounts
that I have read say that the parachute had been deployed so he was already
slowing down before he left the track. There are also accounts that report
a burst tyre. The most likely scenario is that a tyre went whilst he was
braking, resulting in the swerve onto the grass. The damage to Hammond was
probably done due to the rapid deceleration during the crash - when the
skull slows quicker than the brain inside, resulting in the brain hitting
the skull and bruising to the brain. The subsequent swelling of the brain
is life-threatening because of the pressure within the skull. If that is
the only problem and he survives the first few days (which appears to be the
case) then he will probably make an almost complete recovery.
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I'm sad to announce he's told the BBC that because of this unfortunate
incident he's giving up on his dangerous TV career and has decided to
move in with me.
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Yerrs. You're not wrong there.
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Having seen the 25 yr old car do exhibition runs at Santa Pod on numerous
occasions, I find it highly unlikely that it would ever do 300mph, without
something like a 2 mile run to do it in.
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