Whilst the pursuit of speed in a motor car is almost as old as the motorised carriage itself, excessive speed in the wrong setting is never clever and will often attract the attention of the law.
January is an interesting month from a speeding point of view, as during this month in history a number of notable speeding events occurred. Here are just five of them.
- In 1896, Walter Arnold was the first person to be issued a speeding ticket in Britain and was fined one shilling. He was caught travelling at 8 mph in a 2 mph area by a policeman who caught up with him riding a bicycle!
- London's Metropolitan Police began using radar speed traps in 1956. Directing a narrow radio beam towards a moving vehicle and measuring the difference in the returned frequency (known as the Doppler Effect) allows the device to calculate the motorist's speed.
- In 2005, a Canadian policeman booked identical twins for speeding on the same road in the same car on the same day. Having booked an 18 year old woman for driving at 96 mph in the morning, Constable Legere pulled over what he thought at first was the same woman doing 92 mph in the opposite direction a few hours later.
- January 2006, Scottish millionaire businessman Ronald Klos was convicted of speeding at 156 mph whilst holding a mobile phone to his ear. He was fined £3,000 and banned for driving for a year. Less than three months after getting his licence back, Mr Klos was again caught and fined for speeding.
- On 27 January 2007, Timothy Brady of Harrow was clocked at 172 mph in Oxfordshire in a Porsche 911 Turbo belonging to the luxury car hire company he worked for. In doing so he became the fastest ever driver caught by a speed trap in the UK. Having been measured travelling the equivalent of 77 metres a second, he received a 10-week jail sentence and was banned for 3 years.