a sobering read

[Al Bundy]

Here's an extract taken from this thread: http://pistonheads.com/gassing/topic...&t=442266&i=40

I caused an accident after losing control of my car. It was sideways straddling both sides of a B road, a motorcyclist coming the other way came around a blind bend to be confronted with a car blocking the road. The impact launched him over my (destroyed) car and dumped him on the middle of the road, unconcious. His bike had been thrown some 14 metres back the way it came. My car dangled precariously over the edge of a drop past the verge.

After about a minute or so of getting my breath back following the airbag deploying, I realised I'd caused a very serious accident. I'd seen the motorcyclist only for a split second before the impact imploded against the B piller behind my head and shattered every window on the car. My sunglasses had disappeared from my face, glass from the door window was mingled with blood dripping from my face.

There was no way of opening the drivers door, I clambered over the passenger seat and observed one of the worst sights of my life.

For about 50 metres down the direction I'd come from, were the tell tale black lines of a skidding car. These were only interrupted by gouge marks on the road surface where car had met bike. In the middle of this lay the biker, motionless, unconscious, a mess. Onlookers, other motorists, were out of their cars but nothing more than background fuzz.

By the time I got out of the car, some other bikers had begun trying to help the badly injured guy laying on the centreline of the road. For a long minute, he didn't move, he didn't seem to breath. I'd just killed a man. Then some movement, some spluttering. Blind panic from someone who's just woken up to wish that he hadn't. His girlfriend, who had been a few minutes further behind on her own bike, arrived. Screaming and wailing, wondering how this has come to happen. No doubt a million thoughts all arriving at once. Most of them fearing the worst.

First aiders helped on the scene, I didn't know how to help medically. I was guilty, impotent and wondering how I'd gone from an enthusiastic drive to a potential killer in the space of 50 metres. It only took 3 or 4 minutes for the Police to arrive, I volunteered myself immediately as the guilty party. I was breath tested and questioned on-scene, sat in a Volvo, bleeding on the back seats whilst in full view of the prone motorcyclist, by this time being worked on by the paramedics who'd arrived, hoping the patient could last long enough for the air ambulance to arrive.

I'll never forget that poor man, lying there screaming for his helmet to be taken off, his girlfriend in tears and despair and me, not badly injured, no reason to have caused this, other than wanting to enjoy the road.

The motorcyclist spent days in intensive care, being treated for most of his right arm being smashed to pieces, his collarbone wrecked, serious head injuries, damaged eye socket, chipped bones on his ankle and a massive nerve injury. A year later and even after a number of operations, he still has many to go to correct his broken body and his impaired eyesight. The nerve damage to his dominant right arm means he'll never regain full use of it. He can no longer support his children by working on the rigs as he did beforehand.

My car was impounded by the Police and kept from the day of the accident, 30th April 2006 until the July. I was first formally interviewed in June 2006, then again in September. I was charged via postal summons in November last year. Magistrates passed the case to Crown Court on 13/12/06, as their sentencing powers were not sufficient and at that point I knew I was going to prison.

10 days short of a year after my accident, I pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment and banned from driving for 3 years, for dangerous driving. Aside from the odd speeding conviction (I was driving 65,000 miles a year for the previous 10 years), I had never been in trouble with the Police before.

There was no feeling, no shock, no crying or anger when I was sent down from that court room. Just numbness. As the judge finished his sentencing, I had just one opportunity of shouting to my other half how much I loved her, before being lead into the downstairs of the court. The guard, a nice guy in his late 50s, explained that he had to handcuff me to himself, and down I went. Immediately down, through a number of locked, barred gates, to a booking in counter. All my possessions, and my belt, taken. My height measured. All my details recorded. Then 4 hours in a windowless cell with nothing but a wooden bench and contemplation for company.

4.30pm on a sunny Friday afternoon, leaving a happy looking Carlisle, but for me, in the back of a paddywagon. Watching people leaving school and work with a smile on their faces, looking forward to a weekend of choices. I was heading to HMP Durham.

You can say what you like about prison, and how easy it is, how great you think the facilities are, how prison is like a holiday camp. It's none of those things. It's a demeaning, soul-less place full of sad and sometimes evil people who have lives none of us would ever want or even imagine. All the freedoms you take for granted are removed in the name of control and security to the point that you're constantly reminded how little value society as a whole places on your miserable little existence.

I could write reams and reams about the prison system and the feelings being in it evoke, but I fear to do so would be heavy reading for the casual PHer. I would be happy to answer any questions people have about prison or my ordeal, though

[Al Bundy]

Then there's this newspaper article about the incident:
http://www.cwherald.com/archive/arch...0427290890.htm

....and the guy's own version of what happened.

To clarify a couple of points; the day of the accident I joined a group of cars who were meeting close to my home. It was mainly a group of 30 or so Clio owners from the owners club, but of more interest were a small group of Honda owners who'd arranged to tag along on the back of that meeting.

On the morning of the accident, I met the group in Kendal and we let the Clio owners head off towards Penrith where they were meeting another group. Everyone can probably now appreciate the irony when I say I and the other Honda owners let the Clios go before us so we could avoid getting involved in any p*ssing competitions and causing an accident.

Having witnessed the driving of the main group on the way to Penrith, and considering the size of the group (which was more than 40 cars I would have said at this point) and the route they intended to take into the Lake District, I made the decision when I reached Penrith that I didn't want any further part in the drive.

At this point I made the decision to head up the A686 to Hartside, which I discussed with the other Honda drivers. Four of them decided they'd come and have a look at the road. For anyone who knows the road or the area, it's very well renowned and usually features on any list of top ten driving roads in this country.

Five of us (three Civic Type Rs and two identical white Integras) set off towards Hartside. None of us were 'boy racers', none of us were in any competition, none of us had anything to prove. For 6 or 7 miles until we reached the village of Melmerby, where the road starts to climb up Hartside, we drove very steadily, encountered little traffic and nothing of any note took place.

As we came out of Melmerby village we caught up with a group of four cars travelling slowly, it's a scenic route and the people heading up the queue were not from the area and didn't know the road (which I later found from witness evidence). Unbeknown to me, a local young lad in a Corsa had spotted us and joined the queue at the back.

In the next 2.5 miles I overtook the four cars, one of whom overtook the others in the most dangerous way I've ever seen on that road (as in crawling past a car doing 40mph at 42mph whilst approaching a blind bend). Witness evidence from those four cars suggested that I'd passed them like a 'bat out of hell', 'engine screaming' and so on. The road itself is quite enclosed, full of hairpins and interspersed with short straights. As someone who knew the road extremely well I used those opportunities to pass the cars. To this day, presented with the same overtaking opportunities, I would still have no second thought in repeating them.

The cars behind me in our group did some overtaking, though to be honest the nature of the road means you can't see far back in your mirrors. I would imagine the people we were overtaking felt intimidated and it could be assumed that all those similar performance cars were trying to keep up with each other. Maybe they were, I was perhaps being naive in not thinking about how the others behind me would drive. For example, the Corsa I mentioned was singled out by witness evidence as having passed one car right around a blind blind and was reported individually to the Police.

The final straw in the witness evidence was from a man in a Mondeo, the final car I overtook before losing control, an elderly man and his wife who'd been driving for years and years with an unblemished record. He was the car I described earlier as overtaking insanely, which he did twice. He, and then corroborated by his wife, claimed I had overtaken him around a blind right hand bend and immediately lost control in front of him. It simply wasn't true. I'd overtaken him about 1/4 of a mile beforehand, on the exit of a left hand bend. Nobody actually witnessed me beginning to lose control because no cars were close enough to see me, as the bends behind me obscured vision.

I was given the opportunity under Police interview to watch a run done by a Police car up the same route, so I could point out exactly where I had overtaken the man in his Mondeo. On the first run of the video I did exactly that. It wass noted in the interview that I'd done that and that it matched my description from my first interview, done some 3 months earlier.

The reponse from the investigating officers was to sit on that information for 5 months, until I was comitted to Crown Court, then they took the video of the run to the old mans house and asked him and his wife to point out where I'd overtaken them, 10 months earlier. They did not share my viewpoint.

With regards to internet evidence. I've been a member of the Civic Type-R owners site for a long time. I got a reputation as a bit of a sarcastic git and I made a lot of daft comments which didn't often have a grounding in reality, more they were being daft or making stupid digs at people (I'm sure I'm not surprising some PHers with that).

When the accident happened, 4 of the first few cars on the scene happened to be high performance Hondas. A couple of the Civics had windows stickers with the club URL on them. It didn't take a rocket scientist to find out what my username was, and within a few hours of the accident the Police had downloaded the forum and printed out all of my comments. In the light of the events that day, some of the comments on the Civic forum turned out to be very damning. People who didn't know the context in which they were being said, or the character who was saying them would have to take the comments on face value, and face value said that I was a boy racing tw&t.

So now the Police had evidence from witnesses and they had evidence from an internet forum which proved I treated that road like a plaything and was predisposed to driving quickly.

Add to that the thorough investigation carried out by the Collision Investigation Unit. This concluded that the likely cause of the accident was any or a combination of excessive speed, coarse braking and or steering. In reality it was the former. It couldn't be estimated at any time what speed I was doing, as my wheels had continued to rotate through the entire skid and post impact with the bike. The radious of the corners means it would be very unlikely that I was travelling above the speed limit at the time of my accident. It was what you'd now call innapropriate speed.

As the back of the car began to slide, I'd turned into it and applied as much power as I could get, trying to bring the car back around. Despite the huge, almost 90 degree angle of slide, the car had slowed almost to a halt by the time of the impact. When the impact occured, I was still on the throttle pedal, the front wheels were lifted, spun, gained traction and spat me onto the nearside verge. Believe it or not, the investigation report very briefly mentioned this as evidence I may have been purposely 'power sliding' the car, which was ridiculous in the extreme and didn't feature in court.


Presented with those 3 pieces of strong evidence, I had to make a choice. I knew how I'd dríven immediately before the accident, and although it was quickly it didn't match the witnesses versions of events. I knew how I'd written the internet evidence and what I'd meant at the time, could I possibly make a jury understand the comments in their proper context? It was unlikely on both counts.

A Newton Hearing may have been an idea, but my legal advice suggested that the judge had a dislike of Newton hearings and that the outcome wouldn't necessarily be improved just by discounting some smallish parts of the evidence.

So I had a clear choice- fight a full trial in front of a jury and try to argue that it was a moment of careless driving, that I'd gone into the corner too quickly and lost control, knowing that I would receive no discount on a sentence if I was found guilty and that the judge may be inclined to hand down the maximum two year sentence, OR plead guilty to the offences as charged, accept the prosecutions version of events and get the 30% discount as provided by law. It was a hugely difficult decision socially, morally, financially, on every level. I knew that by pleading guilty I would have little right to reply, little opportunity to set anything straight. The newspaper reporters in the court would pick out the juiciest prosecution quotes and print them, as they do all of the time.

In the end the prosecution version of events was the only one heard in court, so it was the only one reported in the paper. It wasn't a true representation of me or of the events, but it's one people would use to judge me. People who I've known for years read those reports in the loal papers, I still have to pass them in the street in this small town wondering if they believe mine or the paper version of what happened. Some people I used to say 'hello' to now try to avoid conversation and even eye contact.


As I've said before, when you're out driving, and particularly if you're making progress, keep thinking about your last 5 minutes of driving and how it would be described by a witness if you were to have an incident further on.
__________________

[Al Bundy]

It also includes extracts from his diary while he was in prison. For those who are curious.

Also some pics...




Mods, feel free to remove pics if you see it unfit.

[Al Bundy]

taken from another forum


might be a good read here too. its very confronting

[Tezzax5]

.

[bruce]

Why, would you post that on the internet. What purpose does it serve.
Plus I take everything I read on the internet with a grain of salt.

[StanTheMan]

Why, would you post that on the internet. What purpose does it serve.
Plus I take everything I read on the internet with a grain of salt.

so should we take your comment with a grain of salt?

Probably not aimed at you, or your type of person bruce. Its probably more aimed at people like myself who go & enjoy the roads. & the underlying message is to keep your head on. leave your ego at home.

I think its a great read. I doubt its fiction. Occasionally when we do have fun on the road we need to get pulled back to earth. I think this article does that superbly

crushing cars will do little or nothing. Education will have far greater sucess

[bruce]

The article is self-serving.

I am on a car forum so that is a bad assumption I do not like to drive.

[Locutus]

100% agree with you there regarding the article stan.

it's very easy to get caught up in the moment, blasting (not necessarily speeding) through the twisties and get carried away.

i get the urge often - "push a little harder, brake a little deeper", etc but i know these are warning signs to something potentially very serious and always back off.

that 10 min shot of extra adrenalin simply isn't worth turning yourself (or worse, someone else) into a potato for life, regardless of how small you may think the risk is at the time. like as if driving on public roads isn't dangerous enough already.

[fastfreddygassit]

Good article, and a very thought provoking read.
As I rider, that is a nightmare scenario, coming around a blindish corner finding a car coming towards you sideways...
*shudder*

[AJ]

sounds to me like a very honest account of a terrible situation, the guy isn't looking for sympathy, moreover, trying to warn others of what CAN & DOES happen on the road............& not just those twisty mountain roads either guys, I see too much in the way of egos, impatience & downright rudeness on a daily basis in my travels on suburban roads, & not from any particular group either, it can be anyone, driving any make or model of car, truck, motorbike or pushbike......& you know what gets to me the most??..............the ones who DO f**kup, pull a stupid stunt & get blasted for it, THEY are the ones screaming & ranting about other drivers ALL the time, had one just this morning, she pulls out of a side road right in front of a car beside me, which had to seriously jump on the brakes (he let her have it with the horn)............not content with THAT, she continued across in front of me (I'd seen the attitude of her car when she pulled out & realised what she was gunna do before she did it & jumped on the picks when the car beside me did)..& THEN, sight unseen (my truck ain't made of glass) she kept going across into the THIRD lane & just about got T-boned by the car on the OTHER side of me who knew nothing of what was going on (again, he couldn't see through my truck)....................then she spent the next 3 minutes in slow traffic, hanging out the window & screaming obscenities at me, the driver who nearly t-boned her AND the car in front of her for slowing her down.

the sad thing is, this happens on a daily basis.

the demographic for this particular piece of road trash? (that's what i call 'em anyway).......... a 20 something girl in a....................wait for it...............red NA8 MX-5.

I didn't offer her a club card.

[fastfreddygassit]

the sad thing is, this happens on a daily basis.

the demographic for this particular piece of road trash? (that's what i call 'em anyway).......... a 20 something girl in a....................wait for it...............red NA8 MX-5.

I didn't offer her a club card.

Jeez AJ. And i guess you forgot to give her my phone number too... *sigh* feisty, 20 something female.
Thanks Clive. Thanks a lot buddy.
ps. I still know where you live.
pps. and I know where Quilpie is too

[Matty]

Good article, and a very thought provoking read.
As I rider, that is a nightmare scenario, coming around a blindish corner finding a car coming towards you sideways...
*shudder*

I think it's a potent reminder that you should never drive (or ride) around a blind corner without expecting the worst (wet, oil, car coming the other way, etc) and being in such a position to do something about it.

[Uncle Arthur]

I see too much in the way of egos, impatience & downright rudeness on a daily basis in my travels on suburban roads, & not from any particular group either, it can be anyone, driving any make or model of car, truck, motorbike or pushbike......& you know what gets to me the most??..............the ones who DO f**kup, pull a stupid stunt & get blasted for it, THEY are the ones screaming & ranting about other drivers ALL the time, had one just this morning, she pulls out of a side road right in front of a car beside me, which had to seriously jump on the brakes (he let her have it with the horn)............not content with THAT, she continued across in front of me (I'd seen the attitude of her car when she pulled out & realised what she was gunna do before she did it & jumped on the picks when the car beside me did)..& THEN, sight unseen (my truck ain't made of glass) she kept going across into the THIRD lane & just about got T-boned by the car on the OTHER side of me who knew nothing of what was going on (again, he couldn't see through my truck)....................then she spent the next 3 minutes in slow traffic, hanging out the window & screaming obscenities at me, the driver who nearly t-boned her AND the car in front of her for slowing her down.

the sad thing is, this happens on a daily basis.

While my reply herein is a little off the topic, what astounds me is the degree of stupidity some people will demonstrate to save themselves 15 seconds - whether they be truck driver, car driver, bike rider or cyclist.....

I drive and cycle, AJ drives both car and a truck and others here no doubt are in a similar boat.... As a cyclist I'm regularly amazed at how much people appear willing to kill me to get to the next traffic obstruction 5 seconds ahead of me. Similar to AJ's experience above where some bimbo can't recognise that mere seconds separated her from death or damage on three instances in under a minute......

I think I surprised a truckie (big mutha F B double) today - I didn't try and race up the inside of him around the corner to get ahead. I sat back and waved him into the lane ahead of me. Total loss of my time - 0 seconds. No fuss, no risk, and no aggro. I watched a bus the other day practically drive over the front of another car as it cut him off to race to the next right hand corner - if the bus driver had slowed and pulled in behind the total lost time would have been about 5 seconds. The irony is that if he hit the guy, there goes his whole morning - big price for a zero gain.

I think there's actually a certain justification for just giving people an uppercut sometimes, or at least pulling them over and telling them to give themselves an uppercut for being such a numptie.

[greenMachine]

We are very lucky. We have a club that runs well organised track days that welcome "first timers". My suggestion is that if anyone reading this thread has a few twinges of conscience about their behaviour on the road, they give a track day or two a go and see if that provides what otherwise they would look for on the road.