Driver who broke speed record from John O’Groats to Land’s End branded ‘reckless’

26-year-old Tommy Davies averaged nearly
90mph over the 841-mile journey

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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.

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. 

n 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”, he said.

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”.