Starting up the car that nearly killed Richard Hammond – 12,000hp jet car

i am finally gonna do what i promised myself i would never do well here it goes oh mike you can do this one mate sure it's a crash that shook the world one that was very nearly fatal for someone that is close to a lot of our hearts and today we're meeting the vehicle that was at the center of it all the vampire richard hammond the popular tv presenter seriously ill in hospital in hospital richard hammond was involved in a serious crash he's been taken to hospital by air ambulance top gear presenter suffered a significant brain injury when the jetpack vehicle he was driving crashed at high speeds [Music] 40 years after being built it still holds the british land speed record at 300.3 miles an hour and it achieved that speed using this this is a rolls-royce or face turbo jet engine straight out of a red arrow and i've been told that full throttle this thing guzzles between seven to ten gallons of fuel per mile so if you turn that on its head that's roughly not 0.1 miles per gallon brutal the car is 30 feet long and with this thing creating 12 000 horsepower it will get the car to 207 miles an hour similar to the top speed of a standard bugatti chiron in just six seconds now the record sits at 300 miles an hour but on that fateful day in 2006 hammond was set to smash that number [Music] hammond recorded a 314 mile an hour run but it was heading the opposite way up the airfield on the seventh run of the day that things went horribly wrong the front right wheel deflated meaning that hammond had virtually no control over the car it was down to this cage and his helmet to keep him alive hammond lost control the car veered off the private runway to the side and onto the grass vampire the car that holds the uk land speed record has been all but destroyed so how did the car go from being a complete wreck after that crash to looking like this [Music] andrew how do you go about restoring a very badly crashed drag racer well there's a few things you have to do one of the things you have to do is the car was very badly um bent in the crash as you saw the chassis was bent the wheels were missing the jet pipe was completely folded the tail fin had been broken so the first thing really is to get the rolling shell back and up and running again so that was done by sanderpod raceway so the chassis was straightened the roll cage had been removed to get richard out um so we'd been cut back so this had to be remade and and fitted okay the bodywork was smashed so new panels were made and fitted and the engine had quite a lot of field inside it so we had to get all the dirt out of the front of the engine so this is the original engine this is from the car from the crash yes right okay so exactly the same engine and you can see the oil tank where the car rolled over is is badly dented so we've left that there really this problem here looks a bit yeah that also got got hit and you originally ran this car back in the 80s you weren't just brought in randomly you ran and drove this car back in the day yes so uh sandopod raceway funded this car and we built three cars this was the first one was called scorpion uh then there was hellbender and vampire okay uh hellbender was almost identical to this car and they were built to race side by side so that was back in 1980 when we had the two cars running side by side and i was one of the drivers kieran was one of the drivers so kieran's here today as well okay so if you engineered this car back in the day can you take us through how this all works so we've got a jet engine here but tell us how from startup to doing 300 miles an hour how does this car work well uh so the first thing is this is a jet engine from a red arrow so the jet engine is quite simple it's got a big section here which is a compressor section uh that has seven stages of compressor and it takes in air from the front here and compresses it through this section here okay it then puts the air into a combustion chamber so there's seven combustion chambers here and each of them have their own fuel injector as you can see around the engine supplied by these so these are fuel tanks these are the fuel tanks yeah we've got 280 liter tanks either side and that's full-on jet fuel from jet airliners yeah this came out of a 747 okay so a few months ago this landed at campbell wow okay great we've also got connections yes and then at the front we have another fuel tank which is right okay a 50 liter fuel tank for the afterburner sure okay the fact you're talking about an afterburner in a car is frankly amazing but yes okay so we've got to the rear of this so what happens there is the hot gases come out of the combustion chamber and turn um turn a turbine disc which drives the compressor yeah just one of the interesting facts about this engine is that to drive the compressor at 100 takes not just over 9000 horsepower so that's just to drew the compressor so is that just pure loss then that's just the 12 000 coming out the back that is after you've spent 9 000 just driving the compressor yeah bloody hell the there's no direct equivalent for horsepower to pounce thrust so what comes out the back of this is 5 700 pounds thrust okay and that's equivalent to literally a jet fighter yes it is right perfect so this is where the red arrow bit finishes because we then took um an afterburner from a jaguar fighter okay and put on the back to to boost the power of the red arrow engine so this whole section at the back is an afterburner right okay and that just takes the power through the roof yes so we designed this for drag racing and drag racing means you need to start very quickly um so when the engine is running at a hundred percent it's putting out around two and a half thousand pounds thrust which we can just about hold on the brakes okay and the brakes that i've just seen inside there's a pedal you're literally sitting a big pedal you're shaking wow so is the car creaking with all that thrust yes yeah bloody hell and then when you're ready to leave you put up put the afterburner fuel on and when the light goes green you press the button to light the afterburner and you go from two and a half thousand to five and a half thousand pounds thrust just by pressing a button okay so 272 miles an hour in six seconds what does that feel like um it's like a big jolt on your back so as soon as you hit the afterburn you have a massive big jolt but you're ready for it and and you're looking down the end of the track and you've picked a tree on the horizon okay and what you're doing is you're steering towards that tree or that object you can see on the horizon you've got one hand on the steering wheel you've got another hand here on the parachute lever so if anything starts to go you just pull that lever back which cuts the engine kills the afterburner and puts the parachutes out okay well let's look at the cockpit you tell me how you drive this thing what are all these controls in here so if you look at the controls here we've got a master switch here which is uh for all the electric circuits so that's normally disabled uh when you want to turn it when you're driving it it's full on you have the big boat pedal there and the first thing you do is press on that brake pedal on this side you have low pressure fuel so this is very much like a fuel switch on a motorbike uh tank yeah so to start it you have that lever forward we then get to this side which is the high pressure pump and we turn that on to act it to put fuel into the engine and then we go for a start okay to start it um there's a starter motor which is bolted on here externally okay on the on this drive here yes on the drive here and so you have some a couple of mechanics with holding the starter motor as the engine starts to turn the reason we have it here is so we can take it away because the starter motor is very uh heavy and we don't want that on board when we're racing okay so we will turn the igniters on and signal to start then the engine will start turning and you'll suddenly hear the engine catch as the as it ignites okay and then you'll wait for the engine to come up to idle speed which will take about five to six seconds okay and then this is your steering wheel is this much use does the car move much when you're going in that sort of speed well whatever you're doing you're not pointing in the straight lines normally so you're going to have to do minor corrections as you go down the runway there's also things like crosswinds which you might need to correct and you know no no surface is completely flat so there will be a little bit of steering but not a huge amount okay so this car is now completely restored it's in working order what is the plan with it now what are you going to put this back on a runway run it or what's the plan so the group who bought it their main intention really is to take it round to shows because it's the uk land speed record holder okay um and to raise money for charities um we will be doing engine runs whether the cars tied down um and afterburner demonstrations um and sometime in the future it would be great to have it running again but we need to do some more work before it's ready to do high-speed runs okay and there's an event nearby in bromley are just up the road where if people want to see it this car will be running or just static or you have to ask them i don't know sorry okay maybe running yes maybe running yes okay well i i would love it to run i'd be i will be driving it through the high street if i if if they offered me the chance okay well i've been told we're allowed to start up today yep are you willing to take me through the process absolutely yes okay let's do it i'm petrified but i'm sure it'll be great good i don't think i've ever been in the presence of a car it quite literally needs to be strapped down to start it up i'm not sure how much horsepower a chain is rated to but we were about to find out [Music] with andrew at the helm and having not run properly since that day in 2006 it was time to give it the beats having demonstrated just what the vampire was capable of andrew took me aside for a pep talk to see whether i'd be up for having a go myself it's not every day that you get asked if you want to start up a jet car the history of this vehicle makes this much scarier than it normally would be but i'm going to give it a go are you okay yep good right what i want you to do is put your finger on that turn the igniter on [Applause] with my eyes fixated on the front gauge and engaging the signal to start creeping throughout the little bit by bit [Music] [Music] that initial flame was just the jet engine dooms himself in lighting which looks great but doesn't actually create big thrust that comes with the afterburner you'll see by my face [Applause] [Music] i hadn't moved an inch and yet the vampire had definitely made its mark it's hard to believe that this thing is classed as a car when you hit that after burner you feel it smack into the back of the seat and that was only 50 60 percent throttle this thing if you look at the paragraph the thrust only properly comes in at 90 percent i can't imagine what that feels like going through your back post an experience what a car it's tough to know what to think seeing this car back in action restoring a car back to running order should almost always be a good thing and maybe the call is to get this car back running and get it regularly doing what it was built to always do but at the same time it nearly took away someone that has entertained all of us for upwards of two decades doing what he loves i think unless you've got millions upon millions of pounds to invest in research development and engineering of such a car that's really the only way you should be going for land speed records it's not the call to take something like this onto a british airfield on a cloudy day and go searching for records i just don't think it's worth it vampire sister car back in the 1980s did unfortunately end up tragically killing its driver [Music] the good news is that the people that now own this car the vampire jet car owners group seem to just be going for showing this car off at car shows statically kind of like what we've done today and maybe the odd slow speed run to still show that the car moves so in terms of going for land speed records i think the time of this car is over anyway back to rovers and v10s you

Channel: DRIVETRIBE

Views: 1,128,508

Keywords: jeremy clarkson, richard hammond, james may, cars, top gear, the grand tour

Id: gbWqcZ5cwt8

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 16 2022