BBC canned Top Gear last year after one of its hosts, former cricketer Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff, suffered horrible injuries in a crash during filming. Since then, the other two hosts—car journalist Chris Harris and comedian Paddy McGuinness—as well as the rest of the network have been quiet about what happened that day. However, Harris recently offered some insight during an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, speaking about how he apparently tried to warn the BBC of the program’s lax safety protocols well before the tragedy.
While the specific details of Flintoff’s crash are still unknown, we do know that he rolled in a roofless Morgan 3-Wheeler without wearing a helmet. According to Harris, the only thing that kept Flintoff alive was his peak physical condition, having trained as a pro athlete. However, the injuries Flintoff sustained were devastating.
Harris says that, on that specific day, he didn’t have a chance to offer Flintoff any advice about the car beforehand. Normally, Flintoff and McGuinness would approach Harris before driving a difficult vehicle for advice, as he was by far the most experienced driver of the three. Unfortunately on that occasion, Harris didn’t get the chance.
“Because of the call times that day, that was the first time we’d never had the chance to talk about how he might approach a difficult vehicle and that was the one day it went wrong. I find that very difficult to live with,” Harris told Rogan. The relevant portion of the interview is timestamped in the embed below.
It’s especially frustrating for Harris, as he saw something like Flintoff’s accident coming.
“What was never spoken about was that, three months before the accident, I’d gone to the BBC and said ‘Unless you change something, someone’s gonna die on this show.'”
Top Gear has always had dangerous stunts. We all remember Clarkson, Hammond, and May driving all manner of vehicles inches away from cliff edges, where the smallest mistake would result in instant death. Presenters on this show have taken to the ocean in boats built from cars; Richard Hammond almost lost his life multiple times. For these very reasons, there are always supposed to be safety crews working in the background, along with rigorous preparation beforehand, to make sure things go smoothly and no one gets hurt. Harris said he saw the erosion of those protocols and tried to warn the showrunners about it.
“All too often, in the last year, I saw situations where it got too dangerous.” He recalls one instance where McGuinness fell off the back of a moving vehicle and, while he ended up being OK, the ambulance driver was two miles away smoking a cigarette. Unfortunately, Harris claims that the BBC ignored his concerns, which ultimately led to Flintoff’s crash.
Fortunately, Flintoff has recovered from his injuries and is still working, having just produced and featured in another BBC series where he mentors a team of teenage cricketers. But that doesn’t make what happened to him, nor the BBC allegedly brushing off safety concerns, excusable. “I’m very happy and proud to have done Top Gear, but I’m so sad at the way it ended,” Harris said.
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