Top Gear star says he warned BBC before Freddie Flintoff crash that someone could die

The BBC later announced that it was canceling Top Gear “for the foreseeable future” and that presenters Paddy McGuinness and Chris Harris would instead reunite for a new season.

Speaking about the accident on The Joe Rogan Experience, Harris explained: “He wasn't wearing a helmet. And when you do something like that, even at 25 or 30 miles an hour, you're going to get serious injuries.”

“I was there that day. I was the only presenter who was with Fred that day. I wasn't right next to him, but I was close.

“I still remember the radio message I heard. I always had a radio in my little room on the test track so I could always hear what was going on.

“And I heard someone say there was a real accident here, the car was upside down. So I ran to the window, looked out and he wasn't moving, so I thought he was dead. I assumed he was, but then he moved.

“He's a physical specimen, Fred, he's a big guy, 6'5, 6'6, strong. And if he wasn't so strong, he wouldn't have survived.”

Harris explained that the Morgan three-wheeler Flintoff was driving was a “very difficult car” and that only two people on set that day had driven one before – himself and another professional driver.

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He said that because of his automotive experience, he usually speaks to Flintoff about particularly difficult stunts or rides on the show, but that “due to the timing of the call that day, this was the first time we didn't have the opportunity to talk about how he would approach a difficult vehicle.”

“It's hard for me to live with,” he said, “and I feel partly responsible for it because I didn't have a chance to talk to him.”

Harris continued: “I saw this coming. There was a big investigation, a lot of soul-searching, the BBC is good at that.”

“But what was never talked about was that three months before the accident I went to the BBC and said, 'If you don't change something, someone is going to die on this show.'

“So I went to them, I went to the BBC and told them my concerns based on what I had seen. As by far the most experienced rider on the show, I said: 'If we carry on like this, at the very least we will suffer a serious injury, at the very worst we will [a] death.'”

Harris said he felt Top Gear was in an “arms race” to do bigger and bigger stunts with The Grand Tour and that he had “all too often seen situations over the last year where it became too dangerous”.

He continued: “What really gets to me is that no one ever really acknowledged that I announced it beforehand. That's a hard thing to live with at first.

“When I knew, I thought I had done the right thing. I'm not very good at this, I usually just go with the flow, but I saw this coming.

“I thought I'd done the right thing. I went to the BBC and found that nobody had really taken me seriously. I did a bit of research afterwards. The conversation I'd had with these people was kind of noted. Then they tried to silence me a bit and then they didn't care about me at all.

“They just left me to rot. And even now I'm completely baffled by the whole thing. To actually tell an organization that something is going to go wrong and then to be there on the day that it goes wrong is a situation I never expected and never want to be in again.

“It's weird and quite heartbreaking in a lot of ways. I loved that show.”

RadioTimes.com has contacted the BBC for comment.

In a previous statement from BBC Studios on a health and safety review of Top Gear last year, it said: “The independent health and safety review of the production of Top Gear, which examined previous seasons, found that while BBC Studios followed the required BBC guidelines and industry best practice in producing the show, there were important learnings that must be rigorously applied in future productions of Top Gear UK.”

Flintoff recently returned to television with the second season of his cricket show “Field of Dreams”.

In October, it was confirmed that Flintoff had reached a settlement with the BBC. The settlement was worth £9 million, according to The Sun, as the presenter lost out on income for two years.

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