Presumably he concluded that a rocket-propelled car, capable of reaching speeds in excess of 300 mph, didn't represent any sort of significant risk?

Presumably he concluded, like Donald Campbell, Andy Green and numerous others before, that the risk had been minimised as far as possible, and what risk was left was worth taking.

This is a classic mistake. The point of risk assessments or any similar formal ways of assessing potentially-dangerous situations is *NEVER* to remove all risk. (If you want to remove all risk, stay at home in your armchair and get fat and lazy, while the rest of the world actually *does* things.) No, the purpose is simply to *assess* what the risks are. When you know what the risks are, you can do something about them - for instance "the brakes fail and I do a Stuka into the wall at the end" has a mitigating action "fit a couple of parachutes". There's still the risk that the brakes *and* the chutes fail, but you've done what you can to reduce the overall risk.

In this case, one risk they should have covered was "driver error". Maybe they thought his existing experience was enough. More likely they thought that with some trial runs at lower speeds, he'd be able to see whether he could handle it at full whack - which is exactly what they did (remember that this was his 6th run).

Top Gear is about real people and real cars

Really? Well, OK, they're real people and real cars, but only in the same way as the Queen driving a Rolls Royce is a real person in a real car. Back in the real world, it's completely outside the experience of just about everyone watching. Consider other motorsport - F1, for instance; that's got real people in real cars, going incredibly fast in difficult conditions. But we don't all rush out to accuse Michael Schumacher of causing their niece's death. And nor do we say "I'm glad Ayrton Senna ran into that wall and died - he was a menace to society". Or maybe a better example would be touring cars, which are actual cars you might be driving every day - no-one says that they're inciting boy racers. Or if they do, (a) I haven't heard them, and (b) they're talking rubbish.

Graham.