Prince Harry Details Attempt to Find Closure After Princess Diana's Death by Driving Through Tunnel Where She Died in 'Spare' Exceprt

Prince Harry visited the place where Princess Diana died in an attempt to find closure.

Princess Diana passed away in 1997 after a car she was driving in crashed while driving through a tunnel in Paris. Ten years later, the 38-year-old Duke of Sussex drove through the same tunnel at the same speed.

He detailed the experience and shared what he learned from it in an excerpt of his memoir Spare.

Click inside to see what Prince Harry wrote…

While in France for the Rugby World Cup semifinals in 2007, Prince Harry asked his driver to take him through Pont de l’Alma, the tunnel where his mother died.

He opened up about the experience in a clip shared with People.

In the clip, he recalled asking his driver if he knew where the tunnel was and then asking to drive through it “at sixty-five miles per hour — to be precise.”

“The exact speed Mummy’s car had supposedly been driving, according to police, at the time of the crash. Not 120 miles per hour, as the press originally reported,” Prince Harry wrote.

The driver agreed and took him to the tunnel. On the way, they passed another landmark: “Off we went, weaving through traffic, cruising past the Ritz, where Mummy had her last meal, with her boyfriend, that August night. Then we came to the mouth of the tunnel.”

“We zipped ahead, went over the lip at the tunnel’s entrance, the bump that supposedly sent Mummy’s Mercedes veering off course,” the prince described. “But the lip was nothing. We barely felt it.”

The experience of driving through the tunnel was not what he expected: “I’d always imagined the tunnel as some treacherous passageway, inherently dangerous, but it was just a short, simple, no-frills tunnel.”

The then 23-year-old drove through the tunnel a second time before they finished.

“It had been a very bad idea. I’d had plenty of bad ideas in my twenty-three years, but this one was uniquely ill-conceived. I’d told myself that I wanted closure, but I didn’t really. Deep down, I’d hoped to feel in that tunnel what I’d felt when JLP gave me the police files—disbelief. Doubt. Instead, that was the night all doubt fell away,” he wrote. “She’s dead, I thought. My God, she’s really gone for good.”

Prince Harry continued, “I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it.”

“I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux,” he explained.

Spare arrives in full on January 10.

Prince Harry tells other stories within the pages of his upcoming memoir, including one about a heated encounter with Prince William. The Duke of Sussex also answered a question about his future as part of the royal family.