Richard Hammond says he still lives with 'syndrome' as a result of crash

The Grand Tour star Richard Hammond has revealed that he is still living with the fallout of his horror crash which left him in a coma nearly two decades later.

Viewers are used to seeing the TV icon, 54, behind the wheel of a souped-up motor and getting into mischief with his co-stars Jeremy Clarkson and James May, so it's easy to forget that he had a very serious reminder of his mortality.

He has always remained his usual happy-go-lucky self and hasn't been scared of putting his foot down, despite being at the centre of arguably the worst ever crash shooting a Top Gear stunt.

The Hamster driving cautiously? Hell might freeze over first.

Even when he's trekking 1,000 miles across the Sahara in a malfunctioning Aston Martin DB9, which his mates easily outrun him in for the latest episode of The Grand Tour, Hammond is still cracking jokes and laughing his way through turmoil despite being the tortoise racing two hares.

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The beloved show's latest special, aptly titled 'Sand Job', shows his latest adventure with Clarkson and May as they replicated the route of the legendary Paris-Dakar rally in cheap modified sports cars.

Even when Hammond accidentally zoomed straight into a minefield in Western Sahara, after steaming through a tunnel which may or may not have been brimming with Ebola-diseased bats, he had a smile on his face.

And when his colleagues ribbed him for doing James Bond a disservice - being behind the wheel of 007's iconic motor - he took it on the chin while giving as good as he got, of course.

Although the Top Gear legend might look like he's completely back to normal after his traumatic 2006 smash, he recently told LADbible that the experience 'never leaves you', and that he is still living with a syndrome as a result of it.

Back in 2006, Hammond had climbed into a jet-powered dragster at the RAF Elvington airbase in York and was driving at almost 320mph when one of the tyres blew, causing him to spin out of control and crash.

The vehicle was flipped upside down, leaving him with serious brain damage and in a coma for two weeks.

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But you can't keep a car-mad bloke from Birmingham down for long and he made a miraculous recovery, before returning to our TV screens the following year.

Speaking of what life now looks like for him 18 years on, Hammond told LADbible: "I think anybody who's suffered a brain injury will probably agree that it never leaves you in the sense that there's always a little bit of you..if you lose your car keys or you forget something.

"Mine was a frontal lobe injury, which would explain that. I'm left thinking, 'Oh, no. Is that because of the brain injury? Or is it because I'm now 54? Is it just because I've lost my keys?'

"The doctors actually call it 'lost key syndrome', and it goes on and on."

People who have suffered severe brain damage often experience struggles with planning, abstract thinking, flexibility and behavioural control, but Hammond says he refuses to let these symptoms get the better of him.

He continued: "But I think now that event, like many other major events in my life and minor ones, has just become soaked up. Were each of us just made up of the things that have happened to us.

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"And whether that's exciting childhoods, adventures, holidays, marriages, divorces, births, massive crashes, head injuries, whatever - they are who we are.

"So I've now filed it away amongst the things that have gone into make me up into who I am now.

"I'm still that irritating bloke from Birmingham, but that's another one of the experiences that turned me into the version of of that that I am today," he joked.

"We've all got moments - they don't all involve crashing at 320 miles an hour, some of them are good, some of them are bad. But we've all got those moments that that form us."

The presenter added that he and his wife Mindy, who he credits with waking him up from his coma, were determined to make the best of the situation from the get go.

Hammond said: "It would have been easy for me to make it a bad thing, but my wife and I decided early on that whatever happens, let's make this a good thing. "It's an opportunity to learn to learn about ourselves and to turn it into a good thing."

The Grand Tour: Sand Job is now available to watch on Amazon Prime.