Another day, another near-death experience for accident-prone Richard Hammond, who feared he would become fish food during a terrifying encounter with a shark “the size of a school bus” while filming his new series.
Richard was left shipwrecked on a desert island with Mythbusters’ Tory Belleci for The Great Escapists, tasked with building something to get themselves off the island.
So the pair constructed a raft and sailed half a mile from shore, out into crocodile-infested waters off the coast of Panama.
Unfortunately, the raft had “some issues”, and pretty soon they were treading water.
Suddenly, Richard saw a shark “like a school bus” as it “shot out of the water like a missile leaving a submarine” - and the Grand Tour host gulped at the prospect of becoming a “tasty morsel”. “We both got out of the water pretty quickly...” recalls Richard.
Thankfully, the film crew’s boat was nearby and the pair managed to leap aboard for safety.
“We’re very brave and very tough, and we survived,” says Richard, though the beast, it turned out, was whale shark, which wouldn’t eat a human.
Richard has endured a series of accidents since he was severely injured and left in a coma for a fortnight after he crashed a Vampire dragster travelling at 300mph in 2006. He also hit his head in a fall from a motorbike in Mozambique and narrowly escaped the wreckage of a supercar crash before it burst into flames in Switzerland.
Understandably, Richard had minor concerns during his latest castaway expedition.
Namely, he admits, “the possibility of death, at all times”.
- The Great Escapists launches on Amazon Prime Video on January 29th
