From The Sun Online:

[...] he looked across at James May and said: “Hello C**k face.”

The idea to drive a jet car actually came from Hammond. He skedaddled into the office one day and, bubbling with his trademark enthusiasm, said: “Hey, why don’t we go somewhere and drive really fast? I don’t mean supercar fast. I mean REALLY fast.”

From what I understand, you sit there, you push a lever to light the afterburner and you then push another to shut off the fuel supply — it runs on heating oil — and deploy the parachutes. A hamster could do it. In fact, a hamster did.

After the crash:

“I want to do a piece to camera”, he told the crew. He even fought the ambulancemen, who said he couldn’t. No surprises there. Richard likes fighting. He does it a lot.

Clarkson also replies to the accusations that the show’s producers pushed them to do these kinda stunts. A very good read.

“In the wee small hours [late on Thursday night] Richard Hammond suddenly sat up in bed, opened his eyes and asked what had happened,” Clarkson said. He had replied: “You’ve been in a car accident.” Hammond asked whether he had been driving stupidly “before getting out of bed and walking, shakily, to the lavatory”, Clarkson writes in today’s Sun.

More at The Times Online.