Six years ago, Richard Hammond put Rimac on the map for a reason that no one wanted: he crashed it on his TV show. Now, he has built the confidence (and the automaker has summoned the courage) to get back behind the wheel of the car he fell down an Alp in.
Hammond has always taken the blame the for the accident, openly admitting that no matter how futuristic, impressive, or electric a hypercar is, it can always be driven incorrectly. He only blames the Nevera insofar as it was so fun, it encouraged him to act stupidly.
“I’ve always fessed up: It was me,” he says in a new video for Drivetribe. “And my excuse was, it was so crazily, addictively fast, and so drivable and exploitable that, well, I crossed the finish line at a Swiss hill climb, and kept my foot in. And no amount of computer wizardry and technical genius can defy physics.”
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The result was a frightening crash that Hammond credits Rimac’s engineers with saving him from. He explains that after rolling three times and landing on its roof, the safety cell was still intact enough for the door to open, allowing him to exit. This is remarkable considering the example he was driving was only the eighth the company had built.
In the new video, he is finally allowed to get back behind the wheel of the EV without crashing it. In so doing, he discovers that, although the all-electric hypercar can be a fire-breathing dragon, it doesn’t necessarily have to bite your head off. When driven correctly, it can actually be quite enjoyable.
“Sometimes, if you’re lucky enough to drive a hypercar, which I have been — and crashed them — there’s a sense of it only working on a track, not in the real world,” explains Hammond. “But, I mean, I’m now driving around the aptly-for-me-named Alpine circuit, and it’s a car.”
Despite its four motors, which combine to make 1,888 hp (1,408 kW/1,914 PS) and 1,741 lb-ft (2,360 Nm) of torque, its electric powertrain means that it’s quiet and comfortable at low speeds. Unlike the jet-powered car that he also crashed, he says that getting back into the Nevera is actually quite nice.
Hammond says that “as soon as [you] set off, this puts its big electric arms around you, and says, ‘Nah, you’ll be alright, mate. Just don’t get carried away this time.'”