Richard Hammond

“I run a lot. I have this five-mile run that I try and do a few times a week. If I do more, I get shin splints and it drives me mad, so I have to balance it.”

“At home I drive an old Land Rover.”

“I think a basic level of fitness can help the body cope with all manner of incidents.”

“I damaged all the complicated bits of the brain to do with processing and emotional control. I was prey to every single emotion that swept over me and I couldn't deal with it. I had to re-learn things from scratch.”

“Forty is brilliant and I love it. I'm happier now than when I was 20.”

“Ask any Ferrari, Porsche or Ray-Ban salesperson about their average customer and you will very likely hear that he is not, as the adverts would have us believe, a virile young footballer with shiny hair, a rippling six pack and a trouser pouch like a new punch bag. He is, in fact, a middle-aged bloke wearing more chins than he started life with and carrying the clear evidence of forty years of beer and pies slung across his midriff.”

“I'm not reckless. I was never reckless.”

“I mostly drive around in a Fiat 500 TwinAir, and that's a pretty small car!”

“If I can be cruel; I'm not a big fan of the Audi R8, actually.”

“I like to think that my arrogance, impetuosity, impatience, selfishness and greed are the qualities that make me the lovable chap I am.”

“And I like pygmy goats, because they're just lovely, and ducks.”

“No action hero is more closely associated with cars than James Bond.”

“I would love to act. I probably won't make it to Hollywood at 42 years of age, but I'd love to act.”

“It's not just the kid who's spent every penny from his job to upgrade his car to tell the world he cares about sports cars, it's also the person driving around in a fuel-conscious hybrid electric car, because it's more a message to the world than an effective means of saving fuel, to be quite honest.”

“I'm a presenter.”

“My grandfather on one side was trained as a cabinetmaker but eventually worked as a coachbuilder and then built cars. I inherited from him a love of cars, but with no technical ability whatsoever, sadly!”

“I had post-traumatic amnesia, five-second memory, it happens as a result of brain injury.”

“Failing my driving test first time; that was a disappointment on a geological scale.”

“With the case of running, it really is a case of get out, set yourself a distance, run it, and then do it again the next day. It's tremendously simple.”

“I don't particularly want to smear myself into a hillside.”