Motoring experts have called for a record-breaking car enthusiast, who drove the length of Britain in less than ten hours, to be prosecuted for speeding.
The driver, 26-year-old Tommy Davies, drove from Scotland’s John O’Groats to Land’s End in Cornwall in nine hours and 36 minutes, the Daily Mail reports, setting a new unofficial land speed record for the 841-mile cross country run.
The time set by Davies, who was accompanied by his friend Tom Harvey, is around five and a half hours faster than the journey length quoted by Google Maps, the newspaper says. It equates to an average speed of nearly 90mph.
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Davies completed the journey in a lightly-modified Audi S5, says The Sunday Times. The car was equipped with improved brakes and an engine performance chip that boosts the vehicle’s power to 400bhp.
In addition to performance upgrades, the paper says the German coupe housed a larger fuel tank in the boot to significantly increase the car’s range.
The duo planned the cross country sprint over a six-year period, The Daily Telegraph says. They split up the route into various sections so they knew where police would be parked and “where the speed cameras were”.
Davies takes the unofficial record from Neal Champion, the paper says. Champion, who has held the fastest time since 1984, completed the journey on his motorbike in 11 hours and 14 minutes at an average speed of 78.7mph.
Following the record run, Davies said: “if you speak to a lot of people, the ten hour mark doesn’t seem possible to break. With the average speed cameras and the police, the odds were stacked against us. A lot of people said it couldn’t be done, so we went out to prove them wrong.”
The stunt has been condemned by the AA’s road safety chief, Ian Crowder, who called the young driver “totally reckless and irresponsible.”
“For somebody to deliberately set about to break the land speed record and admit how many police he passed and how many cameras he avoided is an outrageous example of putting lives at risk”, he said.
Crowder suggested that the video footage from Davies’s drive should provide the police with “all the evidence they need to prosecute him”.
