'Richard was right to race'
By TIFF NEEDELL
September 21, 2006
IT'S ridiculous to try to stop these things happening. They are all planned, they are voluntary by the presenters.
When I did things like that, we went into it all properly, there were researchers and it was all done on a proper track.
You are entering into a dangerous area, but 50 per cent of the world are thrill seekers. When you are three or four years old one brother will want to jump off the climbing frame a step higher than the other.
As we grow up, some of us become thrill seekers and others will become quiet, normal people.
But I think the thrill seekers want to go out and do whatever challenge makes their life more exciting and it's ridiculous to try to put a stop to it - they're not actually harming anyone else in what they are trying to do.
You sometimes think it is a fairly selfish thing to do - to go out and risk your life - when you have responsibilities, like a wife and family, but then again, we are a bit selfish. I think that's the only moral issue - whether you do something knowingly dangerous when you have a wife and kids.
As regards stopping people doing this... You're going to stop me? For whose sake? For my sake, probably. But it's my choice.
I'm doing what I want to do as an individual, which doesn't harm anyone else.
I always feel like I'm going on board a car that the viewers will never get a chance to drive. And I'm merely giving them the feeling of what it's like to do these things. I think that's great television.
Richard would have built up to those speeds and I'm sure at every step they would have said, "are you happy to keep going". He wouldn't have just gone nought to 300 on his first run.
Obviously Richard's driven lots of fast cars, he's probably driven 170, 180mph in a supercar down a runway before, so he's been in the higher echelons of speed.
And driving a jet car isn't a very complicated thing to do. You just need to be very cool headed, and alert, should things go wrong.
They've been drag racing these things for 20 or 30 years, and you get two of them, up a drag strip, side-by-side up to 300mph and safely stop. There have been thousands of jet car runs, It's not as if he was getting into an experimental vehicle.
Is the Tour De France a bad example to cyclists? Is throwing a javelin encouraging people to start chucking spears? Is sprinting encouraging people to run down pavements? Where do you end?
Yes, we glamorise racing on racing tracks, but we're not ever suggesting you do that in a different environment. When people put that together, there's no real logic, it sounds a logical argument, but when you actually analyse it you can say that about any form of sport.
If we're encouraging people to become racing drivers, by glamorising racing drivers, or drag racers by glamorising that, then it's good.
