Operation Haulage: UK 🇬🇧 Cannonball Record and Avoiding Prison - Tommy Davies 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

A nine-hour-and-change drive from John O’Groats to Land’s End sounds like pub talk until the police show up at your farm with a search warrant. We sit down with Tommy Davies to unpack the UK cannonball world, why record attempts live in a weird space between obsession and evidence, and how one headline can turn into Operation Haulage and a Crown Court trial with prison-level stakes.

Along the way, we get specific about the UK’s enforcement landscape, from average speed cameras to Home Office type approval, and why “burden of proof” becomes the real battleground when tech data doesn’t match what the prosecution expects. Tommy walks us through the raid, the seizure, the charges, the disclosure fights, the experts, and the moments in court where a fair judge forces the process to stay honest. It’s part motoring history, part courtroom drama, and part warning about how easy it is for public opinion to harden before facts are tested.

We also bring it back to our own backyard with ADV Cannonball Rally updates: how the points system works, what it takes to earn awards like Rough Rider and Checkpoint Crusher, why alumni love the banquet, and the big 2027 twist: a real closed-course dirt race stage with bonus points. If you’re into adventure motorcycle rallies, GPS checkpoint strategy, and the stories that make this community what it is, you’ll feel right at home.

Transcript

Welcome And What’s Ahead

SPEAKER_10 0:02

Welcome to the ABV Cannonball Podcast. We discussed all things on two wheels, the adventure by Cannonball, and other motorcycle-related nonsense.

SPEAKER_15 0:24

Season five, episode five. Welcome to Adventure Cannonball Podcast. I am your host, Taylor Lawson. Today I am joined by the Cannonball Master of Disaster, better known to you as Aaron Pufal. Aaron, welcome.

SPEAKER_14 0:40

Thanks, buddy. And yes, I am a full disaster, and I embrace it with both hands.

SPEAKER_16 0:45

Well, you know, that's what we love about you.

SPEAKER_14 0:48

Someone has to.

SPEAKER_16 0:49

Someone, someone's someone's gotta, you know, there's always that special person out there that we all care for. You just happen to be in. Oh my god. I'm your special friend. Stop it. Stop it now. Cancelled already. Demonetized. Demonetize your out. It's a good thing we have no sponsors. That's right. No one will be offended. No, no, that's not true.

SPEAKER_15 1:11

Many will be offended, but we won't lose any money over it.

SPEAKER_14 1:13

That's right. Why don't you tell us what's coming up in this episode?

SPEAKER_15 1:17

What's coming up in this episode? Is a big ADV cannibal rally news. It's the ADV special stage. And it is a what? It is a race, baby. Wow. Very nice. Next, we have an awesome, I think it's one of your best pieces of work, Aaron. And that is the interview with Tommy Davies. And he is the UK's most notorious speeder, allegedly. And his UK cannonball record and his arrest and his trial in the high UK court. Amazing story.

SPEAKER_14 1:50

It's really, really amazing. It's the first time he's appeared on a podcast, and I'm sure it will be the beginning of his equally as notorious podcast career. But more importantly, where are you?

SPEAKER_15 2:01

What are you drinking? Well, sir, I am in extremely warm, well, bystanders is 27 degrees Stockholm in this heat wave in northern Europe. And um to fight that, I am sitting with an opords IPA, New Sweden IPA. Nice. How about you?

SPEAKER_14 2:22

I'm actually breaking the trend here. It's 9 36 in the morning. So I'm gonna have a hard liquor.

SPEAKER_15 2:30

Hard liquor, you're going right for it.

SPEAKER_14 2:31

Going for the Zambuka. Nice. Well done. I'm gonna go for the Hoofthgold Pilsner made in British Columbia. 25 IBU sadly, 5% alcohol.

SPEAKER_15 2:47

Cheers. Well, that'll work. That'll work. Cheers, brother. Anyone else out there who wants to join us? Grab yourself a drink, sit down, and lock in. Here we go.

Awkward Run-Ins And Road Stories

SPEAKER_15 2:58

So a little bit of awkwardness happening happening here from last podcast to this one.

SPEAKER_16 3:03

You want to talk about that with our buddy Jan Frederick?

SPEAKER_14 3:06

Yeah, so just hours after we published the last episode, and I was running my mouth about the guy who was, you know, the rich guy Tech Bro, turned adventure author who got pulled over for camping out in the center lane in Germany. He just sends me a picture, and it's him having lunch with this guy. And he goes, Had a great lunch with this guy, and I told him not to hang out in the center lane.

SPEAKER_16 3:36

I think that's the same message you heard from the police about a week earlier. Yeah, it's the greatest, the poor guy.

SPEAKER_14 3:42

I would have deleted that immediately. And that was kind of my point. I wasn't trying to like, you know, make fun of the guy.

SPEAKER_15 3:48

I well, I guess I was, but hold on, hold on. You can, yeah. Yes. You're you you you made a good point about the fact that being in the left-hand lane is, of course, not sensible. And of course, I had to follow up with it's not safe either, because you know Johnny Safety, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_16 4:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_15 4:06

Anyways, it was very awkward to see see that picture. Yeah, awkward, awkward. But hey, you know, story of your life, right? So when I was on the way back, last I saw you, um, we left each other in England, and I came across um a ferry, spent a spent a day camping with um Dutch Minion uh and her bike. And then after that, I went to the ferry in Germany, and I pulled right up to the front of this line of traffic, and I met these two very, very cool guys who were Swiss and they were on a six-week adventure and they were doing a trip around the Baltic. Um, anyway, uh Josie is one of those guys, and he said the other day he texted me and he said, What are the actual awards?

ADV Cannonball Awards And Points

SPEAKER_15 4:56

So, what are the actual awards, Aaron?

SPEAKER_14 4:59

So anyone can achieve the first overall. This is a tough award to get, right? So simply the criteria is whoever has the most points at the end wins. And that's a combination of checkpoints, extreme checkpoints, off-road checkpoints, and of course, the highly sought-after first two arrived bonuses every day. So whoever has the most points wins. Simple as that. And what's fun, if there ever is, and there really can't be, but I suppose mathematically it's possible, if there's ever a tie at the end, 30 minutes before the awards banquet to break the tie, we have a full contact slow race in front of the awards banquet. So, but anyways, that of course will never happen.

SPEAKER_15 5:45

Yeah. Just take a moment and tell us what a full contact slow race is.

SPEAKER_14 5:51

Yeah, so quite simply you have a start line and a finish line. In the period of what space? Whatever I choose, right? So it'll be like a parking lot, yeah, whatever is convenient. Okay. So, and the last person to cross the line or the last person, whoever doesn't touch the ground, wins. But full contact means there are no rules after the start is given. So if you want to try to go after someone and push them over, or you want to cut them off, or you know, you want to kick them or something like that, you can go ahead and try it. But the fact of the matter is, that's probably not going to help you. Like if you try to be a douchebag, you're you're the one going to fall, you know, tip over and touch the gram. So that's what a full contact slow race is.

SPEAKER_15 6:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_14 6:30

Okay, good to know. So carry on with the awards. And then whoever finishes, and also check the regulations how you finish, you have to finish by being at the awards banquet. Basically, you have to arrive at the awards banquet. There's cutoff times and such. Everyone gets an actual medal. It's actually super awesome medal, you know, medal. In the second place, if there is a mathematical second place, they of course win steak knives. That's the the running joke. Steak knives. Yeah. I love that. And then anyone who finishes, this is anyone, anyone who finishes all of the paved regular checkpoints. Remember, only dummies get extreme checkpoints, you get the checkpoint crusher award. And then all of the badasses who finish all of the regular unpaved, optional dirt checkpoints win the Rough Rider Award. And then I was thinking, well, what about people like Hunter who have already won the first overall? How do you encourage them to go for the other awards like the checkpoint crusher and the rough rider? Well, I came up with the hat trick. So to win a hat trick trophy, you must, at some point, over the course of the years, win all three of those awards.

SPEAKER_16 7:52

Wow. Hunter, your work is cut out for you, buddy.

SPEAKER_14 7:56

And then we've always kind of had the award of the furthest to travel to get to the rally. And I've ordered that award and I've decided in recognition of the first person to come, you know, the furthest traveled, we're gonna now call that the Bollinger Award. So the Bollinger Award is whoever has traveled, actually traveled to get to the start line, wins the Bollinger Award.

SPEAKER_15 8:23

That's after Robert Bollinger, who currently holds that. He received the first one.

SPEAKER_14 8:27

Yeah, that's that's exactly right. Very nice. And then any other awards that we want. So if someone's being extraordinary in the spirit of cannibal baker or something, we can hand out other awards.

SPEAKER_15 8:40

Like if somebody happened to like break their leg on day six and ride two more days and then get get go out to the Daytona start in a luggage cart, get on their bike, and then ride the ride the last day like a champ. That's right. And then ride their motorcycle back to Texas for another two days like that.

SPEAKER_14 8:59

That's right. So there's badass awards and spirit of cannonball and things like that. So uh so we can recognize people who who have done something special.

SPEAKER_15 9:08

Very nice, Aaron. Where are we? I know you were poking around on the internet. Where are we the second most popular podcast? Not number one, not number three, number two. Where are we?

SPEAKER_14 9:22

Well, what's most annoying about that is we are number two to our own round table episodes. They are consistently 10 to 15 percent more downloads of Carrie's round table than our own episodes.

SPEAKER_15 9:38

Carrie, make sure he doesn't hear this episode, okay? Just don't let just make sure he doesn't get this in his feed. All right.

SPEAKER_16 9:45

We're gonna cancel that that special episode series. Special episodes gotta go now. There's one more to compete with, damn it.

SPEAKER_15 9:53

Great job, Carrie. We love what you're doing there. Thank you so much.

Viral Posts And The Rally App

SPEAKER_14 9:57

Where we are not second is we just had a Facebook post go viral. So there's hundreds of thousands of views and shares and comments of the announcement of the 2027 America's Cannonball registration is open. So it was really cool to see uh to see that go viral.

SPEAKER_15 10:15

That's fantastic. And it's amazing. So you were talking before we turn the mics on, you were talking to me about how that works and how that legitimizes so people who are potentially naysayers or poo-pooers of the internet or social media, that it kind of shows that this is how it works and it does work that way. Can you back that up?

unknown 10:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_14 10:33

So if we have posts that are just kind of silly posts that are not engaged with, those obviously don't really go viral. You can see they have a few thousand shares and clicks and things like that. But if people start clicking and sharing and commenting, then the algorithm says, hey, this is clearly important to this demographic, and then it propagates it. So it truly is. The algorithm thinks that you know this is interesting, unlike the algorithm thinking that this podcast should be number one. But that's a story for another day. Yeah, that's another day.

SPEAKER_15 11:02

That's like it was like that crazy thing. Like when we were when we were in the UK, we uh we were, I think we were doing the lowest price interview the next day, and we went to a pub, as you do, and I and I we're playing that crazy ass pool game in the back. I still don't know what it's called or how to play it, but I did one shot and it dropped like it sank three balls, and I don't I don't know if they were in the right holes or whatever it was supposed to be, but that that went viral as well. It was nuts.

SPEAKER_14 11:27

Yeah, because some people thought it was interesting and it got shared around that clicky group, and next thing you know, it's it's got thousands and thousands of views and shares. But anyways, and I also wanted to mention that um our rally checkpoint app is now being used as far as Saudi Arabia. So there's a classic car rally that started to use the app in 2027, so that's really cool to see it kind of make its way around the world.

SPEAKER_15 11:54

Yeah, it's also, I mean, the fantastic thing, as well, is that everyone's they're debugging it. So by the time the few, I think it's been only a handful of things before it actually got used. And that's been since the upgrade, but all this stuff gets knocked out and finished and it makes it perfect for the time that we use it for these rallies.

SPEAKER_14 12:10

People always have suggestions for improvements, but never want to pay for it. But those are a bit annoying. Yeah. Or I think it should work this way. I'm like, that's not very helpful. But what is helpful is when they stress test it and they do find a legitimate bug. So we haven't found any in the last year or so. But when people use the app and we don't charge for it, it actually costs me because server usage I get billed as the servers get used. So, but it does help our cannonball rally because we feel more confident in it because it's very strange, because a whole year will go by and then boom, you have hundreds of users, right? So it's important that, you know, in my opinion, that the system gets used throughout the season.

SPEAKER_15 12:56

Yeah, very good. And it's good that people are using it. And also we had someone use it for a sailboat race, didn't we? I thought that was interesting as well.

SPEAKER_14 13:02

Yeah, it's a great use case. So why have a committee boat sitting out at a marker buoy in the middle of nowhere waiting for sailboats to show up? And as a matter of fact, that's what this guy from Saudi said. He goes, It's unfair to have a volunteer sitting out in the middle of the desert when it's plus 40 degrees just to make sure that you know Habibi showed up in his classic car. This is better, it's safer, it's more accurate. There's no judging involved, there's no human error to be made. So there's a lot of positive things, and there's some great uses that haven't been come up with yet. I don't know if it's uh an airplane race or something like that, or a foot race or a scavenger hunt. The the app can be used for other competitions. I think Red Bull needs to hear about this.

SPEAKER_15 13:49

Yeah, if they want to pay for some upgrades, that'd be awesome. There we go.

Cannonball Films And UK Terms

SPEAKER_15 13:53

Hey, uh Aaron, did you watch anything interesting this weekend?

SPEAKER_14 13:56

Yeah, I did a bender. I re-watched all of the classics.

SPEAKER_15 14:00

Wait a minute. Were you doing a bender on just like doing a bender, or is it a bender on watching things?

SPEAKER_14 14:06

Both. You just combine it together. I'm too old for that kind of vendor. I watched the Gumball Rally movie circa 1979. That was fun. And then I watched the Gumball 3000 documentary in 2003, and I did that because I wanted to see all of the classic, you know, personas and personalities that Tommy was talking about that have been around forever. So that was really cool. And then I watched Apex. It's uh subtitle is The Secret Race Across America, and that is with this guy, Alex. And I actually, it's not on this list, but I also watched last night, I watched the cannonball movie. And boy, that does not age well. That is cringe worthy. They literally drug and kidnap this chick and throw her in the back of the ambulance. It's like racism amok. The KKK show up in the in the thing. Oh my god, it is it is cringe worthy, dude. It did not age well, but anyways, it is a part of history. So I watched it, but I'm like the whole time, it was like, boy, that's tough.

SPEAKER_15 15:12

Oh hey, somebody told me the other day they were like, you know, it's a Christmas time movie, right? Love actually. And uh someone's like, you know, there's the the Blue Nose Awards. I never went back and looked for it, but he's like, if you really look at Love Actually, that didn't really age well either. There's some pretty, there's some pretty cringe rising moments in there as well. Yeah, it's not good, but anyways. But hey, Christmas movie. I'm gonna watch again next year is what I'm gonna do. Before we start this next interview, um, I just wanted to say when I listened to it, I thought that there really should be a glossary of terms so that people would know what these common UK words are. But you've got a couple here. Let's uh let's roll through them.

SPEAKER_14 15:57

Yeah, so he says home office a lot. And home office or home office approval is basically like in the US saying uh the federal government, or in Canada, you would say the crown. So when he says home office approval, he's just saying that like this is top-tier, like federally approved type of equipment. And then some legal stuff, he says disclosure, and then in our side of the pond, it's discovery. And then the last one I picked up on was he says he heard something over the tanoy, and that just means the PA system, the public address system.

SPEAKER_15 16:33

Okay, and a of course, a barrister is a lawyer, barrister and solicitor, yeah, man. A solicitor. That's the solicitor. You need translation for solicitor. Solicitor is also an attorney, by the way.

SPEAKER_14 16:46

Yeah. Yeah, and more importantly, we were gonna play his next interview back to back, but it's so good that we're gonna do another episode with Tommy.

Why The Tommy Story Matters

SPEAKER_14 16:56

So this interview is about Operation Haulage and his court case and breaking the UK cannonball record. And then next week, we're gonna play his interview about it. Just happened, the Gumball 3000, and he did it with Ed Bullion in his Bugatti Veyron. It's a fantastic story, also. So we're gonna play this one interview now, and then in a few days, we're gonna drop another episode with the Gumball 3000 experience.

SPEAKER_15 17:25

And we decided to do that because this is the same reason that we make the awards banquet 20 minutes because basically we all have the attention span of toddlers.

SPEAKER_14 17:34

Yes, and we're so good at making short episodes, Taylor.

SPEAKER_15 17:37

Well, I mean, that interview alone is gonna make this a two-hour episode, right?

SPEAKER_16 17:41

Yes, and we should shut up and with that, roll the interview.

ADV Cannonball Rally Registration Spot

SPEAKER_17 17:46

Adventure, endurance, glory. This isn't just a ride, it's the ultimate test of rider and machine. The ADV Cannonball Rally challenges you to ride from coast to coast, navigating checkpoint to checkpoint by GPS and pushing past your limits. Take on every off-road stage, and you'll earn bragging rights and a coveted Rough Rider trophy. Own the Twisty Tarmac and you'll claim the checkpoint crusher award. Every mile counts, every choice matters. Rack up the points, and your name could be etched forever on the winner's cup. This year the routes are harder, the mileage is longer, the glory is greater. The ADV Cannonball Rally is open for registration. Fortune favors the bolt. Sign up today.

SPEAKER_14 18:47

Did I pronounce

What The UK Route Really Is

SPEAKER_14 18:48

that right? No, it's give me a give me a correction. It's uh pronounced Langlofthan. Thank you. And I'm sitting here with Tommy. Tommy, welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to be here. And this is on the back of Bo Ernest's interview, the uh U.S. motorcycle cannonball record holder. Uh, we all know that hero, that legend. We have a really interesting story for the uh listeners today. But let's start off with maybe you can help fill in some blanks. What is the UK cannonball? Maybe you can describe it for us because we're not really familiar with it.

SPEAKER_13 19:16

Yeah, so I think uh the UK sort of cannonball, although we wouldn't call it the cannonball, would be John of Gross to Land's End. So John of Gross is the most northern mainland point in the UK, in the top of Scotland, and Land's End is down in the southern point of uh Cornwall, which is the most southern mainland point. Um, and since you know the late 1800s, early 1900s, um, people have been either biking between them, motorbiking, cars, walking, running, cycling. Someone put a golf ball between it, and they all try and set records between them. So it's got a really big history. Um, it's done a lot now for charity sort of stuff. So, you know, we have our local sort of radio DJs to raise money for you know, children in need, they'll run it, you know, between the two points over a couple of weeks or so. Um, so it's about 830 to 880 miles, depending on what kind of road you're on, so motorways or backroads or lanes. Um, people have even paddleboarded between them uh along the coastal edge all the way around. So um it's got a very rich history that's not not as well known, should we say, as the cannonball run in the U in the US?

SPEAKER_14 20:15

Ed holds the cannonball spreadsheet, the Google sheet for the US. And it's strange how it's always a small community because we're sitting in your man cave, which is awesome. There's your Jag downstairs, there's the Audi and this wicked little French car, and upstairs in this awesome man cave in the middle of nowhere. We've got some high-end uh carbon fiber parts for Ed. So having said that Ed holds that list, I've tried so many times to find the official list for this particular challenge. Is there a list? Does someone steward it?

SPEAKER_13 20:48

I'm smiling when you say this because uh my a good friend of mine, uh Rob, we we've sort of compiled the list that we thought only as maybe me and him were interested in it. Um so we have been compiling a list and trying to verify as much as you can. Um, you know, that there's a lot of, again, you know, just because of the history of it, the legalities of it in more modern times, it's not something you can verify 100%. Um, there's a lot of stories out there that when you look into them, they maybe don't make sense. But um I still think they're they're interesting sort of uh, you know, records or accounts to look at. Um, but again, you know, take them all with a pinch of salt. Um, I think that's a good rule of thumb for this sort of thing if you're, you know, getting over the national speed limit to assume they are all fake.

SPEAKER_14 21:31

We forgot to do our disclaimer. So this isn't a real conversation. This is a conversation between two AI agents. They just happen to be incredibly handsome and well spoken. And uh this is uh this is a fake conversation, of course. I ask about the list because nowadays everything is properly officiated, right? You need a witness at the beginning, you need a witness at the end. There are apps for tracking uh speed and people monitoring. Those apps, people will come and spot check you along the way. So it's quite legitimate now. Do you think it's all just gone because of your story we're about to get into, or are there people still have an appetite for this type of uh challenge?

SPEAKER_13 22:11

I think like a sort of modern cannonball in the UK is a niche. I mean, cannonball in in general is a niche, and within that niche, there's the the UK arm, you know, and there's even a smaller niche which you go on to mainland Europe. But um, I think, you know, when I first started getting into cannonball, uh, you know, it was Alex Roy, 2006, the thought, you know, the sort of the start of the modern era of cannonballing, uh, and he took the burden of proof to a whole new bar where it was GPS, filmed witnesses, toll receipts. And that was sort of the bar that I sort of came of age in. Um, I think somewhere along the line, things change, technology changes, they became a bit more sort of peer review sort of thing. Well, if you know, they, you know, they're good guys, we sort of believe them. Um, and then there was like a, you know, there has been incidences in the past where there's been claims of foul play effectively, you know, sort of like honor among thieves. So there was a real high bar, but I think maybe in in more recent times, maybe, you know, since COVID and stuff like that, that bar dropped a little bit. But it's it's just a tricky one because, you know, who wants to try and prove they're committing crimes? Do you know what I mean? It's it's an interesting one, right? So um, yeah, it's a very delicate line to sort of tread.

SPEAKER_14 23:18

You really hit a nail on the head there because on my way here, I came from Windsor. You know, I saw two police traps. I passed probably a hundred cameras, average speed cameras, the other kind of speed cameras. There were cops on the top of a bridge with some big long-range gear getting people coming over a crest of a hill, maybe a mile and a half away. Isn't this cannonball thing a way to stick up your middle finger to all that? Or is all that effective and why it's not so prevalent and people are afraid to properly document their attempts?

SPEAKER_13 23:51

Yeah, I think, you know, when you go back to, you know, Brock Yates and his 70s cannonball and the reasoning behind that, we didn't have a British Brock Yates, unfortunately. I think the Horsemate has left the stable here, it's bolted here in the UK. I think, you know, maybe the US look at us of what could happen. Um, you know, we're very, we're very similar, the Brits and the Americans, like we're distant cousins, but we're also very, very different. Um, and I think when I was growing up, so you know, I was a massive fan of Long Way Round. So I've watched every episode at the extended DVD. Even as a teenager, I read the book, which for a teenage boy or myself, just reading a book like that was just that's how much obsessed I was about it. So I was always into the sort of travelling and sort of long distance and navigating, you know, different challenges. I'd be as just as happy cannonballing in a tractor as I would be in uh you know a Ferrari, right? So it's more just the challenge of going against the clock and the challenge of going against other people who've gone before you, less about on the same road at the same time. Um, so that that obviously led to Gumball when Alex Roy and Gumball 3000, which for me was uh until you look more into it, isn't the same thing as Cannonball, but it had that sort of they're all in one city one night, and then you know, it looks like they just race non-stop to you know Russia, which they were going in in the early 2000s, or Africa and all these places. And I was really kind of you know, just taken in awe about like having cars from different parts of the world and vehicles going to places they're not supposed to go. But yeah, I think when we come back to the legalities of it all, it's very similar, very different. And I've been on both sides of that fence. And maybe being born and raised in the UK, I can almost go, well, why wouldn't we have if you're not speeding, what you've got nothing to worry about? You know, if you're not on your phone, you've got nothing to worry about, you know. But it does seem to be the police have got a lot of time to measure how thick your digits are on your number plate, whether they're within tolerance, 10 mil out, or whatever, and they have all that time. But when your house is being burgled, they're nowhere to be seen, right? And we live quite rural here up in North Wales, and police cuts, massive police cuts and everything. We've had gates stolen, we live on a farm here, and you just get an incident number. There's always a speed van in the village there waiting, paying someone there with a camera, you know. So, and in Wales, obviously, we've had a national speed limit brought down to 20 mile an hour now. You've probably noticed it when you're driving through. So I think, you know, 20 miles an hour in schools and writing town centers, absolutely perfect. But uh, some of the roads you would have ridden on today, they used to be 40s and now they've been made to 20s, and then we've got people who have driven these roads all their lives, you know, they're in their 50s and 60s, they're getting caught for speed and doing 24, 25, and something that used to be a 30. Um, and you know, they're being convicted for it and they're getting points for it. And it's just like, yeah, I think maybe the pendulum swung a bit too far one way.

SPEAKER_14 26:34

And perhaps, you know, this cannonball thing becomes an answer to that. The John O'Groat to Lanzan, it's about 841 miles.

SPEAKER_13 26:42

Yeah, yeah, it's about that currently on the current roads. I know they're widening bits of the A9 and this diversion, so it it changes from decade to decade. Um, but it's getting less. I don't think they can make it much less now. You used to have to go round the mountains, now they kind of go through them on the A9 in Scotland. But um, yeah, that's the distance there.

SPEAKER_14 26:58

Uh, maybe top with the car that was built, which is actually downstairs, which is really awesome to pass by a piece of history, and maybe you can describe the car, the make, the fuel cell, and all that.

SPEAKER_13 27:07

Yeah, so I mean, um it was uh the first time I thought about John of Gross Land's End, I was actually um my father was visited by an old friend of his who had driven a JCB from Johnny Grossaland's End for charity. And I just heard that and I thought it was quite cool. And this was around the same time as Gumball and long way around, where I was just into just traveling far. And I thought, well, before you go too far, let's have a look at Back Home. And I just thought, oh, John of Grossal Land's End, looked into the history of it all. Um they, you know, records, there were official record attempts in the early 1900s. Uh, Ivan Bihart Davis, uh, no relation to me, or maybe a long-distance relation, I'm not sure. But uh in 1911, he set the final record and his average speed was over the national average, and then they were all banned from then. And it kind of got lost in history then and became more for cycling or running and stuff like that. But there has been a couple of attempts in the 80s, Neil Champion on a Kawasaki motorbike did it in 11 hours 15, allegedly. Um, I've spoken to Neil, he's he's a nice guy, and the story he tells in the 80s, again, very different world. But then I'm coming of age now, I've you know, I'm 34 now, so you know, 10 years ago, so 24, I'd done a couple of rumble rallies, which were kind of European rallies, uh, again, you know, just trying to capture that sort of gumball magic that I had as a child. I think it's amazing how much your kind of coming of age can have an impact on your life, you know, just being introduced to long way round gumball, cannonball run films, even the gumball rally from the 70s can just like shape your whole history, right? So I started doing those rallies. So I bought a car that I thought, well, if I was ever to do some long distance driving, what would it be? And I settled on a an Audi S5, so it was the last of the V8 to 2008. It's got a 4.2 V8 engine, which at 24 years old in the UK might as well be a V12 six-litre thing, you know. So managed to get some insurance on that car somehow, and then just slowly just got into radar, laser defence, uh, not so much fuel cells, they're just not really needed in in Europe and the UK for what I was uh doing these rallies and stuff. I need more luggage space for the parties every night. But yeah, so that was a lot of fun there. But I always had this sort of itch of American cannonball. And around this time, Ed had just kind of re-ignited the cannonball record. You know, Alex had had held his record since 2006, 2013. I'm just leaving university. I've got my first uh got the Audi S5, and you know, this is all just sort of becoming more real now. I feel like I'm at the time, I'm feeling like I'm starting to be an adult, but I think in hindsight, no, I was just a child with more means. Um, so started looking at John of Groats and Land's End, and I think I really like the the kind of Rubik's Cube challenge of it. So, you know, I'd be just as excited from doing sort of um, you know, Paris to Madrid and looking at different routes and strategies and stuff. So I kind of looked back at other attempts to see if there was any sort of data to look at there, and there wasn't really, so it felt like a completely fresh start to look at well, what route are you gonna take? What time are you gonna do it? What's the best sort of strategy here? And that ended up being like a six-year sort of endeavour until you get to around 2017. And I had been up to Scotland in the car and we we drove down to Land's End. And that's that was about it for that. But then about six months later, there's a statute of limitations in the UK for six months for speeding. So I did speak to a motoring solicitor at the time. He said, Well, you know, speeding six months, so you know, if you're not caught within six months, that's all of it. He says he did say the only caveat would be however, I remember this clearly because I thought this won't happen. He said, if the police are motivated enough, if there's enough press interest that they go, no, this is you know, too much, they may look at it, but he kind of dismissed it, and maybe in 25 or whatever it was at the time, thought, well, yeah, there we go. Um,

Planning A Sub-10 Hour Attempt

SPEAKER_13 30:50

so I wrote a post on Piston Head, and this was all part of a sort of court case, went into a lot of detail of this alleged drive, piggybacking off the story of another drive from the uh early noughties in a Porsche that I think in hindsight was just a pure fabrication, just the maths don't add up, but it was very inspiring. So the story in a Porsche that was modified to do long-distant uh organ transplanting, I think it was. It was like a 996 Porsche. It had an equit like a hydraulic system that could lift itself off the ground for quick wheel changing, and then they did a moving fuel refill on the fuel cell on the M6 near Birmingham, but it would have been the middle of the day because they didn't leave till 7 a.m. So they did it in the day. There was a lot of things that didn't add up to it, but there was a time pot out there, and I think, you know, if a time's pot out there, unfortunately it's out there, and the time was 10 hours and 55 seconds. So the kind of fascination now became could it be done in under 10? The under 10 became almost like the under 30 of the cannonball. You know, could it be done in under 30? Could it be done in under 10? And it became like an obsession, right? So we're talking, you know, plans and maps and just all kinds of research. And you know, thankfully, with all these traffic cameras we have, they are public access. So you could study traffic England cameras or study, you know, um, all the way up in the Scottish cameras, and you could see, you know, traffic patterns if there was any planned road works or diversions, and there's all these sort of you could find patterns to try and see what would be best. Um, again, you know, not having any other strategy to look at. You know, if you go to the US, you'd look at Arnie and Doug's strategy, or you look at Ed's strategy, or the countless cars that have gone before. Do you do northern route? Do you do southern route? Do you do one big fuel tank? Do you do lots of little ones, three drivers, two drivers? There's lots of variables, but most of those variables have got an instance you can look at, and it's uh, you know, it's quite good. So yeah, that was the kind of interesting challenge there because it was like, well, we we won't know until it's you know attempted. So I wrote the blog post on Piston Heads, which is like a little UK, I don't know if it's a little one, quite a big UK sort of forum. And it kind of blew up a little bit, and then I got contacted by I think they were like a press association thing, and they wanted to do a story about it uh again in 24. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, cool, yeah. And they said, Oh, we'll pay you. I was like, Oh, brilliant. So they paid me, uh, and it was to go into like the newspapers, but it went in on a bank holiday Monday, I think it went in the newspapers, and it really took off. And then they were like, they wanted you to go on BBC Radio 2, which is our national radio. Everyone listens to Radio 2 if you're above you know 25 or so. And I went, Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, why not? And it became like a panel show. So it was me uh and the head of the AA, the Automotive uh Association, and one of the ex uh top gear presenters, Steve Berry, I think his name was. So it was sort of to be fair for the BBC and what this was, it was quite balanced, right? Do you know what I mean? Should it be you know, should it be applauded, should it be condemned? You know, they spoke about the Bentley boys back in the day who would race the blue train down the Court d'Azur and how we used to do this sort of stuff, you know, a bit of a train buff. So like the Flying Scotsman, the first to reach 100 mile an hour, or the Mallard doing 126 in Grantham. You know, we used to have this sort of thing. But again, you know, I didn't climb Everest, you know, so it's not, you know, is it something to be uh applauded or should it be condemned, right? So that was the sort of talking piece of it.

SPEAKER_09 34:06

Well, a man says he's broken the land speed record from John of Groats to Land's End after completing the 841 mile journey by car in nine hours and thirty-six minutes. Twenty-six-year-old Tommy Davis says he travelled at an average speed of 90 miles an hour in an Audi, which was fitted with the bigger fuel tank and equipment, to detect speed cameras and police patrol cars. And here's our reporter, Tim Johns.

SPEAKER_18 34:29

This guy is pictured in this online video driving his fast car. This is the Audi S5 that travelled from Johnagro to Land's End in nine hours and 36 minutes. He's telling someone that he broke the speed record for driving the length of the UK back in September. This fairly standard car, as he puts it, has a 4.2 litre engine and is modified to have 400 horsepower, which car people tell me is a lot. So we've got a fuel tank in the boot. His car was modified to allow it to go more than 400 miles without needing a refuel. So on the record-breaking run, he only needed to stop once. The planning was meticulous. Apparently, he and a friend spent six months organizing the route, mapping the speed cameras, plotting the problem. On the day of the journey, according to Mr. Davis, the starting gun was fired at 8 p.m. After winding south from John O'Groats, he wins past Glasgow, the quarter to midnight. The run was perfectly timed to pass Liverpool and then burning up some of the busiest sections in the dead of night as he plowed down the M6 and then the M5.

SPEAKER_12 35:46

Where our resume points are.

SPEAKER_18 35:58

Nine hours and 36 minutes later, the finishing line was crossed. What an achievement. Something many thought was impossible. A journey that Google Maps would tell you takes around 15 hours non-stop. Except, uh, well, I mean, to achieve that, he needed an average speed of something like 90 miles per hour. And you'd never manage 90 on those windy bits down in Cornwall, so goodness knows how fast he was going on the motorway. The AA wants him prosecuted. Road safety campaigners are disgusted. Online, many people are leaving comments on the news story along the lines of I would be waiting for the knock on the door from the police if I was this idiot.

SPEAKER_11 36:39

He's so stupid, he thinks it's an achievement.

SPEAKER_18 36:41

For some, this man is a daredevil, a pioneering, record-breaking hero. For others, a dangerous, reckless, selfish, law-breaking fool, putting his and others' lives at risk.

SPEAKER_09 36:52

Well, that's our reporter Tim Johns there. Uh, if he's telling the truth, and he really did make that journey from John of Groce to Land's End in nine hours and thirty-six minutes. Do you condemn him or do you privately admire this remarkable feat? Give us a call on 08000-288-291. But the man himself joins me on the line. Tommy Davis, good afternoon to you.

SPEAKER_13 37:13

Hi, Vanessa, how are you?

SPEAKER_09 37:14

Well, I'm fine. You've certainly put the cat among the pigeons, haven't you, sir?

SPEAKER_13 37:17

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was to be expected. It's um it's quite a controversial thing, really, isn't it?

SPEAKER_09 37:22

Extremely controversial. I mean, let's start with the the overwhelming question. Why? Why did you want to do it in the first place?

SPEAKER_13 37:29

I mean, we're all familiar with the uh the Burt Reynolds films of the 80s with the Cannonball run. Well, they're they're actually based on a real race that took place in the 70s between New York and LA. Uh and they they literally race across country and try and break the record to get to to LA as quickly as possible. Um, it's been done a few times later on uh by Alex Roy and then later on Ed Bollian, and the record still stands today. Uh and obviously in our own country here, I'm not American, I'm British, and we have John of Groach to Land's End, which is kind of a holy grail, really, in terms of more for cycling, but it's been done on skateboards, wheelchairs, JCBs, you name it. And uh back in 84, some gentleman called Neil Champion did it on a motorbike in 11 hours 14, and it's stood since 84. So it's been never since an early age, really kind of a goal of mine.

SPEAKER_09 38:10

But isn't the situation that although you say you you did the drive in that time, because you broke the speed limit so many numerous times while you were doing it, it doesn't stand as a record. You you're you know, you're not gonna get McGuinness book of records, nobody's ever gonna come and give you a medal or clap you on the shoulder. It's only you saying you've done this. That's it, that's all.

SPEAKER_13 38:28

Exactly. Yeah, there's there's no proof I could be making this all up, Vanessa. Um, let's hope some of the people who uh who maybe may not look too kindly on this think that as well. Um, but I mean it it it was a challenge. I mean, uh on the intro there it said six months of planning. That was kind of towards the end. It's been planning for almost six years. Um it's kind of the exact opposite of a normal kind of average drive. You probably just get in your car, you drive to work, you don't even think about it, you've got the radio on, you're thinking about something else, where this was the exact opposite where we took so we were so meticulous in our planning. Uh and it wasn't it wasn't a wheel screeching red hot brakes affair. It was it was very much sort of a nice, smooth, efficient hair in the tortoise sort of affair, where just nice and steady, just keeping it going constant. I mean, we slipped by 15 police constabularies and you know, we didn't have anyone chases or catches. So you can see it wasn't it it wasn't as dangerous as people are making out.

SPEAKER_09 39:18

Or maybe it just was, and you were very wily and you were very sly and you had the appropriate text stuck on the car that meant that you could elude the police. Maybe, you know, you were you were absolutely full throttled the entire time, busily breaking the law and thinking you were in the cannibal run. It was a kind of a fantasy that you were that you were doing, treating the roads, I suppose, as a combination of a Formula One driver and a rally driver, but really you were just a motorist.

SPEAKER_13 39:41

Well, I think you know, you could be the best driver in the world, but you don't have uh control over the variables really, and you need to try and minimize them as possible. You know, the variables are the police, navigation, you know, the the mental and physical endurance of the whole run, really, you know, the health of the car, so making sure it's all up to spec. I mean, how many drivers this morning check their tire pressures, check their brakes for working, I doubt as many as you would think. You know, road conditions and weather and making sure fuel and all these sort of things, as well as sort of, you know, planning on the day we were gonna do it, it's you know, months and months of research on uh traffic websites to see when the roads are quieter, when there's the least amount of road works, when there's no diversions, uh, when the weather was gonna be as fair chance and the roads as quiet as possible. So it's kind of the it's an extreme case, but I think it's a driving style that if you take the speed note of it, it's something we should all be really doing and and and sort of kind of taking a lot of.

SPEAKER_09 40:33

I mean, some people will think it's a bit rich, you know, coming on the radio and then setting yourself up as some kind of advanced driving counsellor when really what you've been doing is absolutely mashing the speed limit to smithereens over a period of nine hours and 36 minutes. Do you think that it's quite fair to lecture people on car maintenance and that kind of thing in your position? Is that right?

SPEAKER_13 40:53

I've driven thousands of miles all over the UK and Europe, and the things I've seen of people who are probably condemning this right now, who probably never break the speed limit, does that make them a good driver? I've seen people doing their makeup in the car, on the phone, texting. I've seen people screaming at their kids in the backseat, driving at 70 in the middle lane. So I I do think that there's, you know, the speed limit's there, and just because you stay under it doesn't mean you're a good driver.

SPEAKER_09 41:15

All right, your average speed, you say 90 miles an hour. So what was the fastest speed that you were doing?

SPEAKER_13 41:21

I don't think I can remember, to be honest, Vanessa.

SPEAKER_09 41:23

Is that convenient that you can't remember because you're on the Jeremy Vine show, or can you really secretly remember?

SPEAKER_13 41:28

I'll leave it to the imaginations of your listeners as well.

SPEAKER_09 41:30

I mean, it must have been off the scale, mustn't it, how fast you were driving. I don't think so. Let me ask you something else. Maybe it's just me, but I can't help thinking. What about calls of nature? Were you able to pay any of those during that very long nine hours and 36 minutes?

SPEAKER_13 41:46

Well, I mean, it comes down to the uh the physical uh and kind of endurance of it. You know, we had to get our body clocks in the right position because we had to become kind of night owls because we left at eight o'clock and drove through the night to the morning. We had to be fully alert, so we also have to train our bladders to make sure that they coincided with our stop in Lancaster so um to refuel. So yeah, it was it was definitely on the list there. It wasn't as many pages of uh kind of details we could on that, but we did have to make sure our bodies were in check.

SPEAKER_09 42:10

So, Tommy, are you proud of the achievement?

SPEAKER_13 42:12

I think I am, you know. I think I am. A lot of people said it can be done. It's not something that you can just do on a whim. You know, John O'Roats is a long way away. For people who have driven up there, they'll understand it's not just let's just go to John O'Groats and drive to land's end. Just getting to the start line is a feat in itself. Um, yeah, I mean, I understand it's controversial. There'll be people.

SPEAKER_09 42:29

Well, there's some people say you just sit in your car, point the car there, and drive there. It's not a feat. You were not a mountaineer, you didn't hollow out a tunnel or crawl there, you just drove there in a comfortable car. What's the big deal?

SPEAKER_13 42:39

Exactly. What is the big deal? And I guess it's it's the time set and the fact that you know we we weren't seen, we weren't caught, we weren't, we didn't, there was no calls, that there's a dangerous driver on the road, all those sort of planning and efficiency made it that we could do the drivers. You can't have nine and a half hours of luck on these UK roads, it doesn't work like that.

SPEAKER_09 42:56

Well, Tommy Davis, thank you very much for talking to us. Let's bring in Steve Berry, the motoring journalist, and Steve uh and Jeff Gazard, an environmental campaigner. Steve, do you think this is something to be proud of? Should we be clapping him on the back for this achievement? Is it even an achievement?

SPEAKER_03 43:12

Well, we used to. Back in the day when Wolf Bonato and the Bounty boys were racing the blue train from the Côte d'Azur to uh Calais, it would have been on the front page of the Times and triumphed as a great British achievement. But um I thought I did think it was a bit rich that he set himself up as some sort of motor and safety campaigner. 91 miles an hour. Think about it. If his average is 90, what was his highest?

SPEAKER_09 43:36

Well, I did ask, he conveniently forgot the answer to that question.

SPEAKER_03 43:39

If he actually did it, of course. I'd like to see some more proof. I think he's I smell a I smell a rat in the letter. Oh, absolutely. He said Alan Parches. I'm surprised he didn't. The Alan Parches of motor. He's wearing a bomber jacket in the pictures on the internet, and it was oh yes, all that talk about checking his tire pressures. To do an average of 90, he must have hit. Do the math. He must have been 150 at times.

SPEAKER_09 44:03

Is part of you envious of the feat? Do you kind of wish that you'd done it? Do you feel like something you would take off?

SPEAKER_03 44:09

Vanessa, I've done 200 miles an hour on a motorway loads of times in Germany. There'll be people now, tens of thousands of people today will go on an autobahn in Germany and drive a lot faster than that guy went. And he's saying he wasn't seen. You were seen, pal. Trust me, you were seen. I made a documentary for Skye about the traffic cops. I went in the traffic control centre at Spaghetti Junction near Birmingham. I spent three days there. You were seen, my friend. Your speed was recorded.

SPEAKER_09 44:36

But if you were seen, where's the retribution? Where's the knock on the door? Where's the fine and the ban? Where's the.

SPEAKER_03 44:42

I was talking to a man who's had the knock on the door. Well, okay. I've had them turn up at my place. I've gone outside and they've gone, uh, the police are in reception, they all sort of you. And it happens. They come and find you. If he did it, I want this guy, instead of all this big talk, I want him to prove he did it. Because I was involved many years ago in an attempt to break the motorcycle record, which he talked about many, many years ago. Long daft. He was unsuccessful or attempted it. But you've got to rattle along to average 90, you've got to rattle along at hell of a speed on the motorways. And if he did, he's been seen and he's going to get a visit. It's as simple as that.

SPEAKER_09 45:18

Let's bring Jeff Gazard in in this. What do you think, Jeff?

SPEAKER_02 45:21

I think Steve and I are on exactly the same page. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Steve. I I had my doubts about this. The guy said to you Vanessa and also in one of the newspapers, we left at 8 pm. We timed it perfectly to pass Glasgow at 11.45, and then we came through Liverpool and Birmingham in the dead of the night, as they are the most populated areas. Not on the M6. You don't go anywhere near Liverpool and you skirt round Birmingham. Average speed cameras all the way from Manchester down to Stafford. Absolutely. And and there are 50 mile-an-hour limits for probably 27 miles, as Steve has just pointed out, 50. You know, you'd have had to have done 170 to make that up over the next 30 miles. This is how speed averages work. I would like to know. The one question I can't quite work out is what this guy does for a living. I wonder whether he's perhaps in the car tuning business, and this is some kind of PR stunt, because he's wearing a kind of a uniform in some of the photos. But let's get on to this. Here's what I'm gonna do. I pledge to write to the chief constable of all of the 15 constabularies he's passed through. I pledge to write to the chief police officer at the Association of Police Officers who's in charge of speeding. Uh, as Steve has said, you don't have to trip a speed camera. There will have been Eddie Stobart drivers, other tracking companies are available, from Glasgow to Cornwall, who will have been ringing 101 the moment this guy passed another 130, because they're the guardians of the road in a sense as well. I I I don't know about this. I think we really need to put a call into Norwich and ask Alan Partridge what he thinks.

SPEAKER_09 47:03

Knowing me, knowing you, aha. That's probably what he thinks. Aha to you two. Thanks very much indeed to Tommy Davis. And also, of course, to Steve Berry and Jeff Gazard. Just time to get your view in on this. Do you kind of admire him? Maybe you don't believe him. Do you think the whole thing's a horrible exercise in trying to evade or avoid the police? 08,000, 288-291.

SPEAKER_13 47:23

Didn't think much of it. You know, that sort of, you know, yesterday's newspaper is today's fish and chip paper, as we say here, right? So a week or two later, it's all it's old news, it's forgotten about. And then I was on one of my friends' Stagdu's in Hamburg, and I had an email come through from my insurance company saying that my insurance had been cancelled. Right? And it was just a cancellation letter. And I thought this is a bit odd. So I rang them up and I was in a McDonald's in Hamburg. And I said, You've cancelled my insurance policy here. Why? He said, Oh, you've been using your car for unauthorized time trials. And I said, Well, where have you heard this? And they were like, The Sun newspaper. And I was like, Well, it's not the most reliable source. I mean, the Sun newspaper's not known for being the most reliable source anyway. But this call was all recorded and then a year and a half later played out in court as well. So it was quite interesting. So I said, Well, where you know, uh, where have you heard this from? And he said, Oh, the Sun newspaper. And he said, The police have been in touch. And I said, The police. And he goes, uh no, no, not no, not the police. And he was really stammering over his words. In hindsight, I should have given it more credence, but I thought maybe he just said it and that was it. I said, Well, am I gonna struggle to get insurance now? He says, No, no, it's a mutual cancellation. Your insurance hasn't been cancelled by us, it's just we're just not covering you anymore. I said, Okay, well, I'll go and get insurance elsewhere. That was it, and that was sort of June, June 2018, sort of end of June 2018. That was sort of the end of it. And then you come to August 2018.

The Raid And The Seizure

SPEAKER_13 48:45

It was my sister's birthday, so we always remember this on my sister's birthday. It's about 7 a.m. in the morning, and I think it's about 15 plainclothes police officers raid my home. So we live on a farm here. So I've got uh my mum and father at the time lived in this big farmhouse, and I lived in this little sort of granny annex, we'd call it off the back. And the place is just flooded with unmarked police cars and a load of police all suited and booted, like for a raid.

SPEAKER_14 49:08

Um, and they're here for me. Yeah, it's the same anywhere in the world. Anytime the police have an excuse to put on the cosplay, they're gonna get and get their friends together and yell at people, it's the same, right?

SPEAKER_13 49:18

Yeah, and I think obviously they weren't local police officers, and local police weren't told about it either. So I think the local police, they must have thought, well, these obviously wanted for mass murder or something. The the response was was wild, right? So they've come to the farm, I've been arrested, you know, they're searching through everything, you know, going through every box, they're looking for number plates.

SPEAKER_14 49:38

Uh, they had a search warrant. It wasn't about the arrest, it was about the search warrant. They didn't have bodies for the search warrant.

SPEAKER_13 49:43

They had a very big search warrant uh for everything you could possibly imagine. So um, yeah, you know, the proverbials hit the fan, as they would say. So I remember uh being taken to St. Asiv Police Station, which is our North Wales headquarters police station, big police station, not the local one, the big one. I wasn't handcuffed, which was which was nice, really. I think that would have threw me, but I was marched in there with two officers in front, the kind of CIDs, and then a gang of police behind us carrying bags of you know evidence. Um when I was checked in, I remember the lady behind the the kind of this check-in-in desk. She obviously, because again, they're police from well down south in the country. I'm being walked in. I'm not cuffed, but she must be thinking, I remember just being so shocked. And uh, she was very stern and you know, checking in with her and everything. And then there was another lady there who escorted me off to get my fingerprints. She was like, you know, it was very tense. But then obviously they must have spoken afterwards and explained what it was all about. And that lady who was doing my fingerprints later on was the nicest lady I could possibly imagine. Can I get you anything or anything like that? Because I think they realized, okay, he's not here for mass murder. Do you know what I mean? So um, that was a big wake-up call. This was, yeah, no, no fun and games anymore.

SPEAKER_14 50:52

So, what does your family think of this? Like, this is a big deal. Like, they must have known about your attempt. Did they know the number? So, what was the number? It was eight hours.

SPEAKER_13 51:00

So, no, so uh allegedly it was nine hours and thirty-six minutes. So uh allegedly we left at 8 p.m. uh and arrived at 5 36am.

SPEAKER_14 51:11

Did your family know about that?

SPEAKER_13 51:12

No, I I never really let on uh, you know, my father's really old school, not into cars or anything like that. He's a farmer. Um, you know, he he was just I I wouldn't be able to go in peace if I'd have told my family what I was thinking of doing or allegedly doing. So um, no, they didn't really know. They know I'd gone to Scotland and and gone for a drive or something. They didn't really know the the full ins and outs of it. But they would have at that stage because of the newspaper article that had come out and everything. But at the time they didn't know. Uh but then because of all the newspaper press and everything, you know, when the police turned up, again, there was still a bit of disbelief to go, well, what are they here for? Do you know what I mean? They can't be for this, it can't, it can't possibly, right? Do you know what I mean? Right. Um, but yeah, obviously we kind of quickly worked out. No, they're here to seize the car. So the car was loaded onto a trailer. Uh, you know, all the the laptops, phones, anything to get their hands on, USB sticks, memory cards, dash cams, just always taken.

SPEAKER_14 52:01

Does your sister ever let you live it down that you render a birthday?

SPEAKER_13 52:04

No, no, she doesn't know. Like her birthday's coming up this year, it's it's a 40th this year as well. And she's like, please don't don't get arrested this one. Don't make it all about you this time, Tommy. Do you know what I mean? So, no. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_14 52:15

So the trial itself was fascinating. And there are some lessons to be learned for other people who maybe hypothetically want to do something like this. So maybe you could talk about the ridiculousness of the court you end up in. And then the ridiculousness, it just gets worse. And then the outrageousness of how much effort was done to investigate you and the search warrants and the seizures, it is an incredibly fascinating story.

SPEAKER_13 52:39

Yeah.

Crown Court Stress And No Comment

SPEAKER_13 52:40

So I mean, I've never been in trouble with the police before. Uh so this was all a massive learning curve. And, you know, in the UK, the sort of court structure is, you know, if you're caught, you know, uh fighting in a pub, it was sort of magistrates level, which is more like county level, I guess, in the States, would it be? Uh, but for murder and crimes, you know, against humanity, I guess, you go to the crown court, which, you know, you know, they normally say if you go into the crown, you're going down. So that's where we have a jury. It's very ceremonial now, you know, well, it's always been ceremonial. The judges wear wigs, you know, and all that sort of stuff. The first hearing you have is at the magistrates. It's just a ceremonial sort of one, procedural, and you plead guilty or not guilty. So uh I think when I was arrested in sort of August 2018, I was under investigation, released under investigation for nearly a year. I think it was, yeah, just over a year. It's 13, 14 months of just waiting. I had a couple of voluntary interviews in between where we went there and you know they wanted to ask more questions. And I went there and was advised to say no comment.

SPEAKER_14 53:39

I was gonna say, please don't tell me you said anything.

SPEAKER_13 53:41

Yeah, we don't quite plead the fifth here, but yeah, it was. It's uh it's a no-comment interview. I mean, I I'm sure many of your listeners haven't done this, but to sit in a room for two hours and say no comment is completely draining. You just gotta say no comment over and over again. That's the point. Oh, it's it's painful, yeah, it's painful. And it's amazing how you you almost, you know, they're very good, the police are when they they're professionals, do you know what I mean? And it's very how they question things that you automatically almost want to say, you know what I mean. So um, yeah, that was a bit of a challenge there. But I mean the the the the stress of it all and the toll, I mean, you know, I think I'm probably the only person who can't get any sympathy for it because, you know, you play stupid games, you'll win stupid prizes, but it, you know, it did sort of take a toll. And in between that time as well, obviously, we'd been invited to do the C to C Express. So, you know, while I was pending investigation, we'd bought a Jag in Edinburgh and shipped in 1974 XJ6, nice straight six, 4.2 litre, and we'd ship that to uh New York and then done Darien, Connecticut to uh the Portofino in there uh for the 40th anniversary of the cannibal.

SPEAKER_14 54:47

Yeah, but you must have known the hubris of it. No, no, I didn't do this, but I'm gonna go over here with this thing and document that I'm doing this. Yeah. Did your lawyer maybe advise you against that?

SPEAKER_13 54:58

Yeah, so there was, I think there was a point where if I haven't, because I've been invited and I was like, well, I can't go. Like, there's no way now. I'm bending investigation, I'm under investigation. Interpol have been involved. So there's Interpol are being asked questions uh around the alleged co-pilot or driver or who I'm with at the time. So they're trying to track him down wherever he may be or her. I've been invited, Ben uh Charlie Safari Wilson, really good friend of mine now, but at the time I hadn't met him. He was like, You've got to come. It's the last C Express. I had been invited in 2018, but it was too close to it. I was like, I was like, I gotta be in 2019. And I said to him, thinking, well, you know, maybe it'll get him off my back. If I'm not charged by May of 2019, I'll come. Because if I am charged the next day, by the time it all comes through the courts, I'll be home. It'll be all fine, right? So I'm not charged by May. So we go and get this jag. I think I paid £4,000 for it. And to be fair, it was an absolute gem of a car. Best money I ever spent. It was all original, been well looked after. We put some big rally lamps on the front because we thought we need them for Texas. You know, I'd been to the States once or twice before, but like very much like a city break. So this was like, I'm going to places I've only seen in films, right? And for my I was like, Texas is just long and straight and dark, so we'll get big rally lamps for it. We changed all the cooling hoses on it, and that was it. I put a new headliner in because it was all moldy. And that's all we did, right? And like naively, just thought that'll be fine. It's got great air conditioning. Uh, shipped it over, got it to New York. Again, really like anxious and paranoid about arriving at JFK and the TSA going, whoa, whoa, whoa, you can't come in. We know that you're under investigation, right? Back you go home, right? So it was just like constantly just paranoid. You know, so we kind of get to JFK. We've also, our luggage is just full of tools, right? Because we're like, well, we need sort of like imperial tools, but metric, we'll just get our own and bring them with us, you know, some spare parts, coil packs and things that we thought. So we get to JFK and we're there, and I'm just like, what's the purpose of your visit? And I'm like, we're here to raise money for fallen police officers for the Cannibal Memorial Run. We've shipped over a JAG. It's currently waiting in um in New York for us to pick up in Newark. Um, yeah, and the race starts on Friday. Is that the race? Is it? Yeah, the race. And he's like, okay, yeah, no problem. Stamps the passport, goes through. And then the guy, my friend behind me, there's a team of three of us, he's obviously getting asked the question of like, is he gonna tell the truth like I have? Or is he gonna think, oh anyway, we all got through, happy days, and then it felt real. And for that two-week holiday, I was free, like in the everyest sense of the American word, because for the last 12 months, I'd just been living under this cloud of just this pending investigation, you know, my life, you know, the crimes I was accused of are, you know, they're they're prisonable offences, you know what I mean. You don't go to jail for perverting the course of justice, you go to prison for a minimum of 12 years, and I had three counts of them. So it was out of it.

SPEAKER_14 57:46

And yeah, maybe you could tell us the charges they eventually settled on, which were outrageous.

Charges That Don’t Fit The Facts

SPEAKER_13 57:51

Yeah, so I had six charges in total. One of them was thrown out by the judge uh at the end because it was duplicitous, but the the first three were perverting the course of justice. So um one of them was using electronic devices to aid in uh interfering or evading speed camera equipment, and they called that was perverting the course of justice. The second one was worded the same, but using uh number plates or something like that to avoid the to pervert the course of justice. Uh and then the the third one was just a rehash of both of them. The thing that was interesting about it is I mean, there was a dangerous drive in charge as well, one of them. So, yeah, there were three perverting the course of justice, two dangerous drive-in, one for speeding and one for an unauthorized fuel cell. And then the sixth one was a number plate charge, incorrect use of a number plate.

SPEAKER_14 58:39

So I have a question about that. Is it a standard charge or was it an unconventional legal theory to charge you with perversion of justice to use a radar detector or some sort of jamming device, or is that the charge?

SPEAKER_13 58:53

Yeah, so it's quite common uh for laser jammers. So laser jammers are in this country legal to own, legal to have, but as soon as you jam a gun, you would be guilty of perverting the course of justice. Now, the way the perverting the course of justice sort of works there is, you know, the course of justice. You could be doing 10 below the speed limit, jam uh a laser gun with your laser jammer, and still be found guilty of perverting the course of justice and get 12 months in prison. Because although you weren't committing a crime, you perverted the course of justice effectively.

SPEAKER_14 59:22

It actually makes sense. I just wanted to know if someone was being creative. And then does the same hold true with radar detectors here?

SPEAKER_13 59:28

No, radar detectors are pretty much useless here, to be honest. I mean, uh 10, 15 years ago, they were pretty much useless. Then now they're very useless. They would work on Gatso cameras, so they're those fixed, wet uh film cameras you'll see on the side of smaller roads, not really motorways. And the way they use, they use a radar that's you know, your Valentine One or your Escort 360 will pick that up fantastically. But they're not used anymore. We use Hadex 3 cameras, uh, you know, a lot of average speed cameras now where they're just taking pictures of every number plate and you know they're they're just using sort of doing the math. Yeah. So they're doing the math.

SPEAKER_14 1:00:00

So just because listeners don't know. So here, believe it or not, when you enter, I don't say a closed section of roadway, there's cameras overhead and they take everyone's uh license plate number. And then they take everyone's license plate number again at the exit point, and of course they know how long it is, and then simple grade five math, they know your average speed, and you just get a ticket in the mail.

SPEAKER_13 1:00:20

Yes. And and and the thing is you see people slowing down for these cameras where they are, and then speeding back up, not realizing that's not how they work, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_14 1:00:28

So those people deserve a ticket, I'm sorry if you don't know how that works, you know. This is uh frustrating thing.

SPEAKER_13 1:00:34

I I've recently been caught speeding by an average speed camera in my wife's electric car, and the reason the speed limit has been dropped to 50 mile an hour is for air pollution, because they believe the car it produces less emissions at 50 than it does at say 60. I can't imagine they're taking into account the deceleration and acceleration. Um, but in an electric car, there's no emissions, but you still get the fine, you know? So that's uh yeah. But the the interest about average speed cameras is, you know, you've got your X, your entry and your exit gantry camera. Um, they may not be in like sequential order. So you might have like, you know, 50 cameras, but number one is paired with number 22, and number three is paired with number 18. So you don't know where the start and finish of these average speed cameras are, which effectively, like the A9, for example, you have over a hundred miles of it where you've just got to stay below the speed limit, and rightly so. But um, yeah, they've they've they've got it's it's a good way of enforcing a speed limit, I think, you know, because it's it's yeah, it's it's difficult.

SPEAKER_14 1:01:28

But unfortunately, it's it's really repressive. You just when you're on the road here, you're just constantly in fear of this kind of camera, uh a noise-activated camera, a cop that's sitting somewhere, it's just it just feels it just feels like uh a heavy air pressure system on you all the time. It just feels it feels like a lot.

SPEAKER_13 1:01:50

Yeah, I think I've heard someone say that, you know, the the M6 and uh and some of the motors in the UK are just like really long prisons with guards just watching the whole way down with sniper rifles, you know? Um, you know, that's how I felt. Yeah, I mean I've heard Ohio's pretty bad, um, but you know, at least it's manned by either a plane or someone on the road. But yeah.

SPEAKER_14 1:02:07

Yeah, it feels no to me that feels like a cat and mouse game. Yeah, right. And let and let let's just be clear uh about all this. So everyone we've had on the podcast talking about a cannonball, they are as clinical and as safe as this young man right here. You remember Bo Ernest? He talked about being, you know, mathematical about it and prepared mechanically and all this. And the fact of the matter is, I don't know if this holds true here, but there's never been in America any real injury or crash or anything. These are all responsible people doing things in a responsible way, allegedly. But, anyways, uh let's uh let's go back to the timeline. So I understand your wife was pregnant by the time you get charged with all these crimes.

SPEAKER_13 1:02:47

Um so yeah, we did the C2C Express. Um the Jag did amazingly. We sort of we changed all the cooling system apart from the radiator cap, and that's the one thing that leaked. And then when we got to uh That's always the way though.

SPEAKER_14 1:02:58

You change that cap, it's gonna leak.

SPEAKER_13 1:03:00

I know exactly the one thing we didn't change was the thing that uh that messed us up there. But uh we did it in 38 hours, 11 minutes, which at the time was the fastest right-hand drive car. Oh, nice. Um, which we were really chuffed about, and also the fastest um foreign imported car, should we say? So, because we ran on old school British number plates, right-hand drive, we absolutely loved the attention the police would look at us and kind of go, What's going on here? Right. And we realized that maybe there's something in here about having sort of this foreign ambiguity about it. And then when we got to the Port of Nino, my wife or a wife to be was waiting there with with our other my friends' partners were there. And then I proposed to her in a place called Paradise Cove in Malibu that I'd been to her in 2016, our first trip to the States. Nice little special place there. I think it's like a trailer park. I don't I don't know if it's that bougie or anything, but uh, it was special to us. You're so you're so redneck, I love it.

SPEAKER_14 1:03:48

The British redneck embracing the American. Yeah, we loved it, right? Lucky girl, yeah.

SPEAKER_13 1:03:52

Yeah, they did they did those uh kind of like I remember they did chocolate cake, and it was like it is the size of the menu, and they put that on the menu. So like, Jesus, that's a big slice of cake. Right. American size. Yeah, American size. So proposed to her there, we came back, and then literally a week after we came back from the States, all on a high, best time, you know, big envelope comes through, and I've been charged with all those things. So that's the end of 2019. COVID all happens, and we can know what happens there, but I'm still court is considered almost. I mean, it was closed for for one month, but then they're like, we've got to get on with this backlog. So we were like essential workers.

SPEAKER_14 1:04:24

Actually, can I ask you? We know of all the legendary COVID attempts. Was there during COVID any attempts that you know of that happened here?

SPEAKER_13 1:04:32

Not in the heat of COVID. There was there was one uh September 21 that didn't finish, unfortunately. Yeah, they um they took a I think a fuel pump went out somewhere on uh Lancaster there. But I we it was something we looked about a lot. Would you have, would it be a benefit to go during COVID? The problem is the police had no one to look at.

SPEAKER_14 1:04:50

Speed cameras are going to be there anyways.

SPEAKER_13 1:04:52

You know, so I think the police were twiddling their thumbs looking for things to do. So you'd be almost like, you know, there's almost like hiding in plain sight sometimes. You've got no one to hide behind, it's just a big open road. So unfortunately, we'll never know. Would it have been quicker? Would it have not? It's something we thought about for a long time. Not something I was thinking of doing at the time because I was already very busy with trying to defend a case. Um, but no, that is an interesting thing that we have looked at and thought, oh, is there a way? Because we've like to compare the data from non-COVID runs to COVID runs in the States. How much of a difference did it make? You know, Arnie and Doug are really the only comparison you can make. Um, but yeah, so that was quite interesting. But um, yeah, so court was kind of kind of reopened. We were considered kind of key workers, so unfortunately I still had to attend court. We ended up having 10 court hearings before the trial because what sort of, and like you say, at this time my wife or wife to be fell pregnant, so there felt like uh yeah, there was a big fork coming up in in my life whether with this case, you know, we were under the impression it'd be dropped. Like it's it's gonna be dropped, 100%, right? We understand at this point the police have gathered their evidence. Their point now, well, yeah, charge him, I can see that. But then when you start bringing the defense in, you think you'd go. Okay, yeah, there's an unlikely prospect of conviction here. And with the massive backlog of cases, murderers, rapists, all this sort of stuff, I think I was hoping it would give you the benefit of the doubt. And they just go, we sort of scared him enough. I think the message has been sent out there, job done, right? That wasn't the case. What happened was as soon as we started to push back, they really started to push back. So we instructed a GPS expert, speed camera expert, and started just looking at their evidence here because it was a GPS tracker that was tracking every 15 seconds on the car.

SPEAKER_14 1:06:33

Um so let's be clear about that. You had an anti-theft GPS tracker, or was it something for timing?

SPEAKER_13 1:06:39

It was something for timing. I think the Alex Roy side of things, you know, I I kind of grew up in that type of cannibal where it was like third-party GPS video receipts, witnesses, right?

SPEAKER_14 1:06:49

Just to be clear. So it's a GPS tracker and it records on a website every so often.

SPEAKER_13 1:06:55

Yeah, so it was a professional grade one. It plugged into your OBD port under the dash there. So it would cycle, you know, every 15 seconds would send a reading. It was, you know, pretty accurate, you know, it was pretty good. And it became obviously what happened is the police subpoenaed, I guess you'd call it, or got a warrant to get all my bank statements, and they found that I was paying a subscription to a GPS company.

SPEAKER_14 1:07:12

You should have used someone else's credit card.

SPEAKER_13 1:07:14

Honestly, right?

SPEAKER_14 1:07:15

There's yeah, so they'd be really good at crime, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_13 1:07:18

Knowing all this now, right? Yeah, yeah. If you do it wrong the first time round, you know all the mistakes you make. But they um so they they subpoenaed or uh, you know, got a warrant for those, uh found out, found the company, got a warrant for them, got all the data that was all presented, and this was the key of their case now. So, but

The Missing Speed Camera Activations

SPEAKER_13 1:07:33

there was something quite peculiar about the case was there's 105 speed cameras from the top of the country to the bottom. There'd been no camera activations, and none of the cameras had been triggered. So there was GPS data that was showing every 15 seconds, and you know, the GPS experts were plotting this data with the location of the cameras and sort of going, Well, this data, if it's to be believed, they're doing 136 mile an hour, say, past these cameras, but there's no activations. And then they would go, Well, it's because he's got dodgy equipment in his car. We're like, Well, let's get the experts in, because to my knowledge, there's no equipment you can buy off the shelf or military grade that could stop the Hadex cameras going off or the average speed cameras triggering. So there was this kind of big kind of elephant in the room, right? Well, the police didn't really want to address it. They were just sort of like, Well, he's got dodgy equipment. Then once the experts were coming in and giving their reports, they were like, Well, nothing you've seized from his car, and there's nothing to our knowledge of between us, 50 years of experience that could stop these cameras going off. They're quite passive.

SPEAKER_14 1:08:31

So, this is the big thing. When I talk to anyone about this story, yeah, they're like, Is that why they charged you with the number plate perversion of justice? Because you just assumed you had a plate flipper or something like that, or I just don't understand. So you have all this evidence, so-called evidence, about this alleged thing that happened, but not one gosh darn speed camera goes off.

SPEAKER_13 1:08:51

No, so the interesting thing is I was actually caught speeding the night before going off. To Scotland, which is, yeah, and it actually turned out to be the best bit of defense I had because now I had a witness to the car and myself the night before. Uh, so there was a very interesting point there, where that we called those Scottish officers to trial and they they were couldn't be found on the day, even though they had months in advance they were coming. And it was because they were gonna hurt the police's case. Because my car, as you've seen, it was very distinctive. It had, as the police described it, a police-like dashboard, right? So we had the same police equipment that Greater Manchester Police had for the light and sirens. So when I was doing these rumble rallies, we had this sort of gimmick of being like, you know, convoy vehicle or export vehicle or something like that. So we had lights and sirens and stuff, and it was very distinctive. The problem is there was no witness to say what car or who was there at the time, apart from these Scottish officers the night before.

SPEAKER_14 1:09:41

And it's this classic case of, you know, we're always going to follow the law and the justice and do the honorable thing. And what a coincidence that cops couldn't show up. Isn't that hard, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:09:51

Yeah, uh, thankfully for us, they'd put it in writing because we we the judge who we'll get on to, because he was uh a very fair judge. And like I needed a fair judge because I needed as much, you know, in my favor as I could. He we had a real big problem with disclosure in this case. That's why we had so many hearings. The prosecution just would not disclose information. We'd go, well, you know, are there speed camera activations? We're requesting them, and they'd be like, No, because no evidence can play in this gray area, right? Where if you had the receipts that said there was no activations, you can't really dance around it.

SPEAKER_14 1:10:22

Sure. And you can't say, well, they didn't work, but then your next trial go, these things are perfect, and this is an instant guilty. So just by coming to court and saying, well, they malfunctioned, I don't know, a hundred times, yeah, then now the next case is going to be, well, you you said yourself they malfunctioned so many times.

SPEAKER_13 1:10:39

So you know, you could say hypothetically, Aaron, if you went to the top of Scotland, drove all the way down, or rode all the way into Lanson really fast.

SPEAKER_14 1:10:45

A hundred tickets.

SPEAKER_13 1:10:46

Yeah, and so if there's no tickets and there's no proof of speed, how do you put a case together? So they went, well, it must be. He must be messing with the cameras. There's 105 cameras that's perverting the course of justice. But if you're gonna accuse someone, you're gonna have to do that. You need the evidence to back up.

SPEAKER_14 1:11:02

You need to have for extraordinary charges, you need extraordinary evidence, you would think.

SPEAKER_13 1:11:07

You would think, yeah. And that's what we thought all the way through, right? We were like, well, you know, uh, this is gonna come to a head at some point. But we realized that the prosecution there were really not wanting to we would disclose a letter that came from the chief of police uh down in the south of the country, which was a letter we weren't supposed to see, but the judge gave it to us he thought it was of interest. And it was basically the chief of police saying, Do we really want to pursue this? We've got no driver, no speed activations. It's happened over 12 months ago. There's no victim, shall we say? He's not from our region, he's from up in North Wales. There's big questions to be asked whether we should be pursuing this, you know? Now, obviously, somewhere along the line, they've had to convince someone to continue with this investigation. So at that point now, someone's arse is on the line, or bottom's on the line, I should say, um, because they've really pushed for this investigation to keep going forward. And when you have that sort of personal interest where you need to make it work, logic and uh goes out the window, tunnel vision sets in, and now it is we are going for a conviction. And even when you point out massive glaring flaws, there could have been a video of me in Barbados that day and they would have ignored it. Do you know what I mean? So that wasn't even there. It doesn't matter, they've got to get a conviction, it crossed that line. So our experts are bought in that, you know, they're looking at all this evidence and they're going, you know, I can't believe they're heavily relying on this GPS data, which again is not ever like criminal evidence level. We have home office type approval here, which all the speed cameras have to be. Because if you're gonna convict someone on evidence, it needs to be so far above approach, the bar has to be so high. So we have home office type approval, same for breathalyzers, drug tests, you know, DNA tests, they've all got to be right because you're convicting people on this. So the police were in this position where they were going, we're gonna ignore the speed cameras because we've got this GPS data. And our argument was if this was the other way around and there was 105 speed camera activations, and I gave you this $20 a month GPS tracker and say, this says I wasn't speeding there, you would laugh me out the building. You'd laugh me straight to jail, right? But that's where they were sort of in that position.

SPEAKER_14 1:13:05

Well, that's interesting you say that. So now if they've said that in court, you would think someone who has some sort of third-party private data, now that's admissible court based on their own prosecution against you. It's very strange. You were they were pushing the envelope on so many things there.

SPEAKER_13 1:13:21

It was, it was, it was bizarre. I mean, like we, you know, had good friends who are uh barristers uh down in London and they sort of advised us at the start and came to us to some of the trial and kind of got us up on our feet. I mean, we really didn't think it was going to go to trial. So who was gonna do what at the trial hadn't even come into it. I mean, we're in June now, 2020, and we're having this huge admissibility sort of hearing, right? Which is like, what's admissible here and inadmissible? And a little video would come up that had gone in the press of nine seconds, right? And at this point, we had a judge who wanted to hang me, basically. He's like the hanging judge. And I remember when I pled guilty at the start of the hearings, effectively. Not guilty. Sorry, not guilty. Okay, Jesus. When I was asked to plead guilty or not guilty, and I pled not guilty, but before I pled, he was like, if you are found guilty of these charges, there'll be grave consequences. And I'm stood in the glass dock here, and this is January of 2020. Before all these hearings, it's like, right, are you just gonna end this now and take a slap on the wrist and go to jail, or are we gonna have this drawn out? Which I think they were hoping I would just take a deal effectively. They always hoped that, right? Yeah, right. And I can see why. Um, but when when we'd obviously gone not guilty and we were gonna fight it, the tones changed then. It was less procedural and more like, right, this is game time. Yeah. Now that judge, I think, would have hung me literally. They would have brought back capital punishment, I think, and hung me for what it was. It was wild, the the vibe there. But then we we switched judge halfway through, luckily, and this judge, we had this first hearing with him. Great day. It was the day where things there was a bit of light at the end of the tunnel. So we were there all day, and basically what we were arguing about is there's a list of all evidence the police have collected, and we'd go, can we have this evidence? And they would go, the prosecution would go, we don't think it'll help you, so no. And it's a really weird position to be in where the prosecutor has to basically have his prosecution hat on, but also then take that off and put a defense hat on and go, can this aid the defense? And if so, I have to give it to him. Yeah, it's a really conflicting position. Is it exculpatory evidence? I guess they call that in the States, yeah. So now this prosecutor was to the judge and we'd asked all these things, and the judge was scratching his head and going, look, this isn't a case where there's uh people's identity be protected or anything. If the defence want to waste their time looking through boxes and boxes, let them. I don't know why you're holding it back. And the prosecutor said something very odd where he said, Uh, Your Honor, I'll swear on oath that there's nothing that can undermine the prosecution's case in this. And the judge's eyebrows were just like, This is bizarre. So he says, I'll tell you what, we've been here an hour or two now. I'm gonna go through this document. We're gonna have a little break, I'm gonna go through it and I'm gonna see. Anyway, he goes out for five minutes, he comes back in and he says, the first document I pulled up can clearly undermine the prosecution's case. And he was raging now with the prosecution because he could see there was something here that they weren't playing the game fairly. So he basically demanded that, you know, ordered that these documents we wanted would be released to us. And then we came on to some of the evidence that we thought shouldn't be in the case, one of them being a nine-second clip that could have been anywhere in the country. Um the clip was from your YouTube channel or something, something like that. No, it was uh it was released uh with the newspaper press at the time. So it was just a short sort of uh kind of a cockpit shot, if you like, between the the two drivers, and it showed uh, you know, some gadgets and gizmos, if you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_14 1:16:24

And a couple of drivers, and they were saying that this was from that day, but really it could have been from Yeah, it was a 90-second clip where we drive past a police car on the left, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:16:32

Could have been anywhere in the country, and the blue eye, as they call it, which is a tetra detector, was bleeping. So in the UK and most of Europe now, we have a digital frequency called Tetra, and that's what all the police used to communicate. And almost all the emergency services, they firearms, Coast Guard, ambulance, it's completely encrypted, illegal to unencrypt, although apparently it's unencryptable. Right, you can detect it. But you can detect it. So if you want to know where a fire engine is, they're completely legal to own, legal to use, right? So there's this beeping going on in the car in this nine-second clip as we pass this police car on the right. The police managed to track down where in the country this was and track down the two police officers that were sat in a car on the day in question. They both said we didn't see any car matching that description, and they were doing speed enforcement. So, I mean, I've been to Scotland loads of times. The video

A Fair Judge Changes Everything

SPEAKER_13 1:17:15

was from another day. So we were saying it doesn't look good to show the jury a video of me driving when it's not actually me on the day driving, right? Of course not, yeah. That has nothing, nothing to do with this case. Yeah. And as you know, with juries and stuff, the more visual evidence you have, the better. If you can put the picture of someone behind the wheel, that's a really big piece of evidence. So if we could get this out, which we thought was fair to do, it would be big. So we're arguing this case now, and the judge sort of uh stops the prosecutor and says, Well, why why why you want this video in? It's not from the day. You can't prove it's from the day. And the prosecutors, well, you can hear beeping in the car, Your Honor. And the judge goes, Well, it could be a microwave for all you know, right? And this was the first instance of, like, wow, okay, this guy is how I thought judges would be, you know, innocent until proven guilty. Where it very much felt like it was the other way around. And um, the prosecutor says, Well, I think it'd be unlikely to have a microwave and an Audi S5. And the judge says, Let me just stop you there. He says, I go to the Nervo ring twice a year. I have speed camera detection equipment in my car. If it's not from the day, I don't think it's admissible. I'm ruling it inadmissible, right? And we were like, oh my God, this is great, right? We've got someone now who's for the first time isn't just walking me to the gallows. He's like, no, if we're gonna have a fight, let's have it fair.

SPEAKER_14 1:18:23

So at the time What are the odds though? We have to say, what are the odds of someone who goes to the ring, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:18:28

The court is the court I was going to is the furthest court from my home address. There's no court in England and Wales that is further to drive to than that court. So the irony of doing me for dangerous driving and preferring the cost of justice, and then making me drive all that way 10 times, 11 for the trial was wild. But he was as far away as he could be, and he goes to the Nurberg ring twice a year. Uh, I just couldn't believe it.

SPEAKER_14 1:18:46

So this is like, let's paint the picture. This is like an oak in mahogany court where the judges are up five feet elevated above everyone. There's 20 people in this courtroom to make it run, and they're all there for you.

SPEAKER_13 1:18:58

It's wild, too.

SPEAKER_14 1:18:59

And this judge comes up with Nurberg ring. How did you not like high-five the people with you?

SPEAKER_13 1:19:04

So at the time, so I wasn't representing myself at that point. Uh, my friend was the barrister, and her husband sort of nudged me. And I was like, I don't think my barrister friend knew what the Nurberg ring was, but her husband definitely did. And my friend who was with me all the way through was just like, Did he say Nurberg ring? Right. But when he said Nurberg ring, he sort of leaned over and did like a little nod, right? Almost like, I don't know, the Nurberg ring. Yeah, I'd be the green hell. You know what I mean? I was like, oh my God, whatever happens, I hope I can go for a drink with you sometime. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_14 1:19:29

And that's fair, right? And that's what you hope that this type of thing should be is we'll do all this, we'll put the evidence before a jury of your peers, but it will be done so impartially and fair. Like you say, and everyone's playing devil's advocate, and the jury will decide. It sounded like they were trying to railroad you, and this guy just comes up and goes, I got your back, we're gonna do this fairly. Right.

SPEAKER_13 1:19:49

Now, it's not like he was one-sided. You know, there were many things where, you know, even in hindsight, you look at it and go, it didn't go our way, but that was the right way it should have gone. You know what I mean? So he was he was straight down the middle. So he was only sitting in for the hanging judge, shall we say? And again, this is where experience you wouldn't know. My prosecutor sort of said, Your Honor, will you be reserving this case to yourself? As in, he can take over this case now and run it all the way through. And he leaned back on his chair and sort of rubbed his arms, and he looked over to me and he went, Yes, yes, I'll reserve this case to myself. So he was the he was the judge from then on out, which was just like, okay, you know, if this was a film now, the music drops, it's game time.

SPEAKER_14 1:20:25

Well, almost if it wasn't a film, they would think so implausible, they probably wouldn't have put it in a script. But he probably thought, just thinking of the judge, he's used to doing gross stuff, he's used to doing dangerous stuff, important stuff. He probably was genuinely interested in your case, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:20:38

Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, I wouldn't want to be a judge or a prosecutor with some of the stuff they have to deal with, most of the stuff. I mean, nothing's nice in a court, is it really? So I think, you know, of all the things, this was probably the most pleasant one where, you know, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't feel like much was on the line. For me, it did, because I'd still have the time's the same. You know, six years in a prison is the same whether you're a murderer or not. Is it it still feels the same? No, it's not gonna be again. So for me it was pretty heavy. Um, and then yeah, my wife's now, or to be wife, we didn't get married till a few years after because of COVID, but she's now heavily pregnant. So now there's this kind of like, right, she's due in sort of October. We're in June. The trial's been set for December, I think. It's like, I'm gonna have a, but we're still thinking this is gonna get chucked out, right? This is they're gonna come to a point, right? There's gonna be a point. We're putting in evidence from our experts who are just absolutely decimating their case. And we're getting letters back from the prosecution, and they're going, it is what it is. This was a famous line from our case that we still quote between ourselves. It's like, it is what it is. And you're like, sorry, we how can it be it is what it is? Surely it's uh, well, we'll have to have find someone to rebut that or remove it. No, no, we're rolling ahead. This is going to trial. Because I think they were just wanting to get this in front of a jury and just go, look, he's on the radio talking about it, he's in the paper, he's got a car with all dodgy equipment on it, you know, five plus five equals 12. Yeah. So it came to a point where we were like, this is gonna go to trial, right? And I'm like, if I have to do time for this, I don't want to blame anyone else, right? I think the only way I was thinking is like, if I'm in prison for this, which, you know, I think it was likely I would have got six years and served three for a first-time offender for what I was accused of is wild. Like, you know, I could have stabbed an old man in a pub and got far less time, right? So it just felt so disproportionate. So it came to a point where I was like, look, I've been studying this case now. It's COVID, everything's shut down. We've had nothing but time on our hands. We've been scouring this, you know, we've been working out exactly where all these speed cameras are. We have AMPR cameras here, which uh are for national security, shall we say? They take pictures of every car, whether you're speeding or not, in all these key locations. They had this. This was the only image they had of a car, very grainy, grey picture. And it had uh a number plate that was linked to me, and a car sort of plotted down through England, about eight pictures. Now, for national security reasons, the government wouldn't give the prosecution the exact locations. So they couldn't be used for speed over time calculations. Ah, because it couldn't do the math calculation. Exactly. So they would give it, they would be say, well, this camera was uh M6 southbound, somewhere in the region of Liverpool. Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_14 1:23:02

So it, you know, it could be an hour away from each other, you know. So it was very vague. Plus, they're not going to give you the explicit data in case the data is slightly flawed, then they'll expose that maybe, you know, we're flawed also.

SPEAKER_13 1:23:13

Yeah, there was a lot of sort of taking stuff at face value. And so only when you look at it deeper, you know, you start looking at sort of the the GPS data, and it's like, well, GPS data, this is why things have to be home office type approved, because you look at some of the GPS data, and at 8 p.m., because my phone was pinging off a mast, they looked at the phone data, they go, well, his phone's actually on the Orkney Islands. So how can he be getting in a car at 8 p.m. to leave John of Groats when his car, when his phone, and he's a with it, he's obviously with his phone, is he not? You'd assume, is on the Orkney Islands, which is a half an hour ferry ride north. And this is just how inaccurate cell mass data is. You know, your phone will ping not necessarily to the nearest mast, it'll go to the mast that you know your cell service provides, or the one that's not so busy right now. So they were trying to use cell site for a bit, and so that was kind of squashed because it's like, well, if you're gonna rely on it heavily, you can't just pick the bits you want are accurate, it will throw it all out.

SPEAKER_14 1:24:00

So But you know, just in case someone's thinking of doing something like this, leave your phones at home, don't be stupid. Just say it, just say it, just say it.

SPEAKER_13 1:24:08

Yeah, hypothetically. I mean, I don't think anyone should do anything that I was accused of. I think it's wild. But let's just say you had to get from one of the country to the bottom really, really quick for some emergency. Don't take your phone. Do you know what I mean? Don't use it.

SPEAKER_14 1:24:20

You'll take your phone for anything, yeah.

SPEAKER_13 1:24:22

No, I mean, this is it with the Americans, you know. We look at it and we kind of go, if a prosecutor in Utah was like, I I want to, I've got enough, right? I don't know, some prosecutor wants to make a name for himself. There's everything's there. Like everything is there to make a case. And I'm sure they they could do something.

SPEAKER_14 1:24:36

Oh, and we're worse. We're using apps like Joiner, we're we're posting stuff on Facebook to make it legitimate. And it just seems, I always say that, you know, law enforcement prosecution are generally lazy. I just gotta go home at 5 p.m. What do I care? Unless there's something in there for them. Like you say, they want to make a name for themselves or politically. Remember, a lot of these prosecutors are gunning to be the attorney general, which in many places is a political thing. So let a lot of decisions made by law enforcement and prosecution. Will this better my career?

SPEAKER_13 1:25:11

Yeah. And I think also like it's the court of public opinion, right? So uh I was naive enough to think, well, America, you know, cannonball over here, oh, it'll be like uh American style, right? Oh, I was wrong, right? And in fact, while I was going through my trial, I was in the newspapers around the same time Doug and Arnie were, right? In the same UK paper. So double page spread in the Sun newspaper about Doug and Arnie breaking the record. This is just before COVID. This is the November November run. And it's glorious. It's amazing. You know, this is for British readers, American heroes, amazing, all this sort of stuff. And then you compare the exact same newspaper for here, and it's You're a villain. Yeah, properly, right? And that was like, right, we are not the same people. And I've done this with an American mindset. Look on into this whole thing with American mindset, how wrong I was, right? Do you know what I mean? And I think it's the same there, you know. Right now, the American public kind of like, yeah, that's cool, it's awesome. It's it's I've spoken to police officers about it. They're like, it's about freedom, it's about the American, right? The sea to shine in sea. And thankfully, that spirit's still there. But if the spirit wasn't there and the public were kind of tired of it, it wouldn't take long for that to come through.

SPEAKER_14 1:26:12

And I think cannonballers, not to take you off the subject for a bit, is I think cannonballers in in the US realize the gravity of doing it properly. And that's why everyone who is serious about it, and I'm not one of them, I'm just I'm just someone who talks about it, they don't want to mess it up. Because a court of public opinion is going to shift very quickly when you've run into the back of a school bus and you've killed the band. Yeah. Right? So everyone realizes what they're doing for now, a little bit of Americana and you know, can be celebrated. I have a note here that during your trial, there was this amazing case that you cited. It was R. V. Milton. Maybe you can talk about this. And I thought, wow, how did you find this? How did you come up with this? It's really uh an amazing part of the trial.

SPEAKER_13 1:26:58

Yeah, so I think uh so how it works in the UK, it might be the same in the US. The sort of prosecution present their case, and then there's a half-time sort of like, you know, they they finish their case and then the defense sort of defend it. We were still thinking, this ain't going to a trial, this ain't going to a jury, it's it's gonna end, right? We're gonna someway this is gonna get thrown out. The judge has the power to go, I don't think the prosecution have met the threshold, I'm throwing it out. Or you can make a thing called a half-time submission, which is basically the defense will submit a document to the court, uh, to the judge, and say, we believe they've not reached their burden of proof. It would be almost dangerous to let it go to a jury, right? We don't even have to defend it. And one of the key kind of cases we found was R. V. Milton. So R stands for like Regina or Rex, it's the Queen versus Milton as it would have been at the time. And this was uh PC Milton was an officer from the Midlands near Telford. He needs to write a book himself, right? Because it is just wild. So I think it was don't quote me on this, I think it was early 2000s, 2005, something like that. I think it was. He was on the M54, which is a road from Telford towards Birmingham, right in the heart of England, really, in the middle there. And he wasn't responding. To an incident, he was in a police car and he was driving, I think, about 140 miles an hour. High figures, right? There's a black box in the police car. The police saw it, they daubed him in effectively, uh, and it went to court, and he was convicted of the magistrates for dangerous driving, right? And you think that's the end of it. No, no, he appealed it. He appealed it on the basis that I'm a trained and skilled police driver. So what's dangerous to some person wouldn't be dangerous to me because I'm trained to speed, right? And it started this whole legal process that went all the way to the court of appeal, where the judge kind of looked at it and said, I need to look at this from a person who has no idea who's driving that car. Would I see it as dangerous? Right now, someone doing speed alone, so you know, someone who went past me at 150 mile an hour in good weather conditions, which it was, uh, you know, there was not much traffic on the road, and all the things were going in his favor, he would go, would I consider that to be dangerous? And what basically came to was speed alone, and this was the exact line: speed alone is not sufficient for dangerous driving. Because if it was, an ambulance responding to a case would be dangerous driving. And they can never, you know, an ambulance driver's never allowed to drive dangerously. A police officer responded to an incident doing 120, that would be dangerous driving. So it set this legal precedent that speed alone was not sufficient for dangerous driving. So we submitted this case. It was a few pages long, spent a lot of time on it, really. And we were pretty proud with it. We're like, this is a this is a good case. So we submitted it in. The prosecution, I think, were quite shocked that we'd done a half-time submission because I don't think they were thinking, well, what could we be possibly arguing? So the judge takes it, he goes back to his chambers and he comes back in, he sits down, he looks around, bit of a stretch, and he goes, When I first had this case, I was reminded of R. V. Milton. I've never seen the prosecution to the left of me and the police move altogether in a huddle so quickly to get around sort of the books and the laptop to kind of look up this case. And he explained the whole case. Speed alone is not sufficient for dangerous driving. And our heart's in our mouth because they're like, he's he's agreeing. He's thinking this, it's not enough. So, you know, there's the weather was as for that day was dry. There was no road works, you know, there was no uh there's no dash cam from another car or swerving or anything like that. All this case is he's driven from the top of the country to the bottom quickly, speed alone. And we'd say that's not sufficient for dangerous driving. So they're panicking here now, and they're like, geez, they're trying to think of something because in a minute he's gonna lean over to them and go, before I throw this case out, is there anything you want to ask? But he then stops halfway through, and this is where we go. He was really fair, even when it wasn't our way, right? I think you get a kick out of this. He said, However, to drive from John O'Groats to Land's End at the speed the prosecution allege for the duration of almost 10 hours, in my opinion, would be dangerous. And in my head, I'm like, you want to hear some of the guys what they're doing in the States? They're going to LA and back to New York.

SPEAKER_14 1:30:51

I was thinking that's nothing, yeah. C to C to C, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:30:53

Yeah, that's a small drive, right? Yeah. So he said, in my view, there is a case to answer and the case will proceed to the defense, right? But that RV Milton, he he then later got in got into all for speeding again off duty in his police car, appealed it. What like he just won't learn his lesson. Like even recently, I think about five years ago, just before COVID, he was in the paper again for crashing up a police car a bit dangerously, and still got his job, man. Like it's the union, man.

SPEAKER_14 1:31:18

It's gonna protect you no matter what.

SPEAKER_13 1:31:20

I think they learned firsthand don't try and sack him because he's gonna fight it to the court of appeal.

SPEAKER_14 1:31:24

It's gonna cost us 300,000 pounds to try to prosecute. We're gonna lose like we did last time.

SPEAKER_13 1:31:29

Yeah, yeah. So that was that was an interesting thing. But no, we we had to then go on to the defense, and that's when obviously, you know, it's not like I hadn't said anything at that point, you

Representing Yourself In Crown Court

SPEAKER_13 1:31:38

know. We I had to, so I was representing myself at this point.

SPEAKER_14 1:31:40

And then there was a line that was it the judge, or is this generally in the handbook a prosecution that only someone who's mentally ill would represent themselves?

SPEAKER_13 1:31:50

Yeah, so when we sort of took over, I was like, right, I'm gonna represent myself, right? Um, my buddy was like, You sure, man, this is this is heavy. I was like, look, the only way I can deal with this if it goes wrong is I've only got myself to blame. I can't sit in a cell and think, oh, if only this was said, it's like it's the only way I felt like I could deal with it. So um we thought, well, we'll look into it and see what sort of literature is out there. And the only thing we can find on the Ministry of Justice site is basically for the courts, which is like a handbook for the courts to deal with people who want to represent themselves. Now, representing yourself at magistrates is a little bit more common, but still kind of very rare. Crown court, really rare, right? Uh, like I, you know, we were asking my friend, the barrister friends, like, I've never seen it in 30 years of doing it, it just doesn't happen.

SPEAKER_14 1:32:32

Yeah, because lawyers will tell you you're only a Muppet where it would represent themselves, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:32:36

Yeah, someone who represents themselves as a fool for a client, right? So being a fool has got me this far.

unknown 1:32:42

Right.

SPEAKER_13 1:32:42

Let's take it the whole way, right? So uh we were looking, found this documentation, and you know, it was quite interesting a little bit because again, it's not for the the litigant person, as they call it myself. It's for the judge and and the clerks to deal with it. So it's kind of well, we'll know what they have to deal with, so maybe we can tailor our approach to it. Because what we don't want to do, we want to play the game, do it properly. We don't want to be just saying the wrong thing or not knowing the process because what we've got to say is really good. You know, we're not trying to get bogged down and you can't say that or you can't say this. So we were very, very cautious of that. But yeah, most of the book was saying that they they likely have some sort of mental health illness, right? So I remember looking to my mate and going, it says mental health illness. Yeah, mental health illness, right? And he was like, you know, jokingly, like smiling at me. I hope he was jokingly. Well, listen, if it's gonna help your defense, maybe he did say maybe we should, you know, plead insanity or something, right? This it would be a bit too late. So um, yeah, so we had to, you know, represent ourselves. So at the start of the trial, you know, going back to the speed camera things, you know, we came to a point where they were submitting expert documentation like up until like a two, a couple of days before the trial, right? And it was like, we haven't got time to defend this and and all sort of stuff. And it came to a point where they'd fixed the hole in the case, which is why is there no speed camera activations? And the police had worked out, they'd said, we didn't check the cameras in time. The cameras would only hold the data for 12 months. After 12 months, it would be deleted, right? Brilliant. That's a fantastic answer, yeah. However, we had all the documentation that we shouldn't have had that showed that they checked all the camera activations within six months of hearing about it, which was well within 12 months of when it apparently happened, right?

SPEAKER_14 1:34:14

How do you not just lose your mind in court and just yell they're effing lying? This was it.

SPEAKER_13 1:34:19

Well, it did come to that almost. It was, it didn't start, the trial didn't start very well. So we walk into court again, maybe more cocky than we thought, because like this is going to be thrown out now, because we'd found another case, which was, I think it was RV Birmingham 1992, which was a case where the police hadn't gone and got CCTV footage. And that CCTV footage could have most certainly undermined the prosecution's case. And because the police had a duty to collect all the evidence, they can't just get the evidence that helps them. They have to get all the evidence. And because they failed on that duty, the case was thrown out. And we thought, well, this is perfect. It quotes CCTV, it's not a big jump to speed cameras. If the police are saying they didn't check the cameras, then that's that's a problem. RV Milton, the case should be thrown out. And if they're saying they have checked the cameras, then there's no activations, they've got to stick to that going through the trial. So this is before the jury comes in. We sit down, say, is there any submissions you want to make?

Contradictions Blow Up In Trial

SPEAKER_13 1:35:11

Yes. So I stand up and say this. And the prosecution is sort of it's all like natter back into, and the judge sort of cuts through the noise and he says, Is the lead officer, the investigating officer, present? And he goes, Yes. Now the woman who started this whole case had let moved on by the time it came to trial. She'd gone to the Middle East to work in an embassy there. But she was being called as our first witness from Dubai, I think it was. So she was going to be on video link. So her kind of second in command, if you like, was in the court. So he was to answer. And the judge asked him outright, Did you check these speed cameras? Right? And he said, No. Right. And then we're thinking, well, that's RV Birmingham 1992, right? That that just confirms our one of our options here now.

SPEAKER_14 1:35:52

You're like, you should have checked them. That was your responsibility as an investigating officer. And there may have been evidence that would be exculpatory for you. And that was the that was the crux of your legal theory.

SPEAKER_13 1:36:03

Because, yeah, because we were thinking, well, what the police are trying to do now is kind of go, there's no activations because we didn't check them. Doesn't mean there's not activations. And the jury would go, okay, that makes sense. But no activations confirmed would go, Well, are we going to believe this GPS tracker? Are we going to believe the 105 cameras that you convict people every day of the week with? So he said, No, I'm raging now because we know also that we've got information that says they did check them, right? And I say to the judge, and the judge just snaps and he shouts, right? This is a big dude. And it's like a church echoey chamber. And he's like, I will not be undermined in my court. We are going to trial, like, end, right? My buddy's like pulling me on the belt buckle, like, sit down. Like, oh my God, right? Not a great start, you know. Bring the jury in. Do you know what I mean? So the jury comes into this sort of tense, you know, mood, if you know what I mean. The jury comes in and they were like, it was like I'd just gone around to my local pub and picked up a load of friends. They were just young guys, most of them. There was one or two, there was a mature lady there who uh, you know, we thought she might have been a bit of a Karen. Um, there was a couple of older dudes, you know, um, but a lot of them were quite young, to the point where the judge every day, and during the trial, you know, when there was breaks, we kind of go, I know how tempting this is. Do not go home and Google this case. You cannot find any information out about this case other than this courtroom. You know, you'll be in a lot of trouble. So, because he knew these like young guys, 18, 19-year-olds, sort of some of them would have been boy races, and like where we're today now, it's like they knew it was all online. Like you just go, I'm just gonna Google a little bit. But they may see something they're not supposed to, aren't they? So it was quite interesting there. So we've had this big tense moment. The jury come in, the second in commander says they've not checked the speed cameras. The lady uh from Dubai comes in on video link, she answers all the prosecution's questions, and then it's my turn to ask her questions. And the first question I asked her was Um, When you started this investigation, uh which would have been, am I right, six months after the alleged offences? She goes, That's correct. Um, I said, Did you check the speed cameras? As we would call the UK speed camera network. And she goes, Yes, I did. The guy behind me, the the DC detective, the second in command now, is looking anywhere but at the judge because he knew. There's no way he's been involved. He he was here, he came to the farm to arrest me. He knew all the way through. And it's not, it's not an obscure thing, this case. You don't have to be Colombo to go, should we check the speed camera network? And she says, Yes, we did. The judge is like making, he's writing down, and his eyebrows are right up because it's only been a couple of minutes since he's just been told no. So he knew something was up there and he's made a big note of it. And then I say I move on to it and go, um, was there any activations? No, there wasn't. And I said, There's 105 speed cameras between John of Gropes and Land's End. Why do you think there'd be no activations? And she says, Well, there was equipment in the car. And I was like, Well, since your departure, we've had experts from both sides, they've all agreed that there's nothing in my car, nothing that could interfere with those cameras. So it's supposed to be news to her, right? And she goes, Well, some of them would have had wet film, right? Now, if you've spent 12 months studying this case, I can tell you exactly where the wet fill cameras are. I think it's one in Scotland and the other two are down in Scotland, uh down in the south of England.

SPEAKER_14 1:39:08

Yeah, so let's be clear about that. So, what you're saying is some of the radar speed cameras are old school film cameras.

SPEAKER_13 1:39:16

Yeah, back to those Gatso ones. That of a Valentine one would pick up. You know, they've been they've been around since probably the 90s, something like that. They were kind of the first gen speed cameras. They're like a big kind of post with a square yellow box, almost looks like a Victorian camera. In fact, the picture you'll still see is like a Victorian camera. You'll see this black and white picture when you drive around the countryside.

SPEAKER_14 1:39:34

Right, but the 105 cameras, there is a mixture of some are old school, some are the most modern, fancy ones as well.

SPEAKER_13 1:39:41

Yeah, because obviously that you know, uh, if you compare it to like New York to LA, New York leaves somewhere, goes through nowhere, and finishes in somewhere. Where Johnny Gross Lands End starts in nowhere, goes through somewhere, and finishes in LA. So it's very rural up top, very rural downside. So in the middle, the heart of the country is where you have the latest, it's the most popular, really, you know, outside of London, Birmingham's the second big city, a lot of converging motorways, so you've got all the latest tech, smart motorways, as they call it, cameras. You know, there's a big headquarters where there's just people watching uh screens there, you know. So, you know, we've always thought, oh, you know, if someone was to do this in today's age, you know, and they see all there's a camera flying through in Birmingham, I'll just make a call because there's literally someone watching the cameras, you know, like a prison. You know, they're watching the roads to see if there's any broken down cars or anything like that, you know?

SPEAKER_14 1:40:24

Yeah, I think about this because I'm here today on my old man GSA, but I have Washington plates on. And everyone, the first thing they say is, well, you can just go through all the cameras. I say, well, listen, that may be well and good, but someone eventually is going to get a beanabonnet of this yank pooping on our system here. And eventually they're gonna call ahead. I, you know, I have that rule of don't be full of your exceptionalism of someone else's country.

SPEAKER_13 1:40:48

I agree with you.

SPEAKER_14 1:40:49

Yeah, but I think here the surveillance state is a thing. I think that in America there are not people sitting around and it is a massive place. I think it's a totally different animal.

SPEAKER_13 1:41:02

But yes, uh, someone hypothetically with foreign plates and yeah, that diplomatic community would we're I mean, we're obviously very close to the EU, but we because of Brexit and even before Brexit, they wouldn't share data with automatically. So for speeding offences, so if a French car got caught speeding by a camera, the French wouldn't tell the British who the driver was, and vice versa. But if you're stopped by a police officer, they'll get your address and they'll follow it up.

SPEAKER_14 1:41:25

I stopped your train of thought. So this lady comes on uh the uh video feed and she says, Yeah, well, but wet cameras not function.

SPEAKER_13 1:41:32

So she said, I said, Well, there's 105 speed cameras. Um, you know, any explanation why they they wouldn't go off? And she said, Well, they some of them would have been out of film. And I said, You're quite right. And I said, out of the 105 cameras, which you have the list in front of you, three of them would have wet film. What do you do with the other 102 home office type approved digital and calibrated speed cameras? And she went, she wasn't liking this line of question, as you can imagine. She goes, it's just my opinion. And the judge said, Well, if the experts in this field have agreed, would you change your opinion? She came over real harsh. It was great, it was a great takedown because she was the first one at the door here at the farm to knock in. And to be honest, I got a lot of respect with her because to be fair, after she's obviously stepped away sort of halfway through it before it sort of getting nasty. And she was the only one who really stuck to the original story effectively. She didn't try and change her statements or change the narrative to fill the holes, even it was to her detriment. She she still just sort of stuck to what she believed at the time. Another one I'd like to go for a pint with one day. I mean, I don't know if she'd think likewise, but yeah. So um the other point was as well, is is uh another sort of takedown there, which was good, was when I was raided here, they were really looking for who the co-driver was, right? So I'm not gonna say the name they they believed it was, but they they sort of knocked down the door effectively, came in and they were saying, Who, where is he? You know, where is he? All this they were saying the name. And I said, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, uh, what's going on? Right? And I remember it to this day because it was a very traumatic day. However, in her statement, 12 months later or so, ready for trial, she said that when she came in the house, she said, Where is X? And I said, I'm not telling you anything about him, which is very different. It implies I know who you're talking about, and I'm purposely not saying it. And I didn't say that. And I wanted to bring that up with her there. It was my opportunity to do it. And I said, I disagree with what you've uh put in your statement there. And the judge cut in. I thought, I've crossed the line here or something. I've said something I shouldn't. And the judge says, uh, sorry, Mr. Davis, can I just ask a question? So, you know, she he's got her on a screen as well. It's all video linked. Um, did you give Mr. Davis the opportunity to sign your notebook? So when you ask questions, you have to sign it, right? To say that's what I've said. Um, she said, he didn't sign it. The judge, sharp as anything, said, I didn't ask you if he signed it. I asked you, did you give him the opportunity to? She squirmed and said, No, I didn't. And then she just got a huge legal telling off about Pace Act 74 and all the procedural stuff that we had no clue about that she should have done and knew. And it just completely took the legs from under in front of the jury. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_14 1:44:05

It's just as important as being informed of your rights. These are your, we would say, constitutional rights. Like these are your charter of rights and freedoms. Like you must be, otherwise, there's no point of the legal system. No, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:44:16

Well, this is it, you know, you kind of go, well, you know, there's that saying, is it? Would you rather let 10 guilty people go rather than convict one innocent people? And this is where the line's got to be so strong. Do you know what I mean? But yeah, and this is where the judge, you know, he didn't have to say anything there. The other judge definitely would have said anything there. And maybe if I had legal counsel, that would have been raised on my behalf by my barrister or something. Another moment there where I thought that was a really sort of fair moment. So

Experts And The CHP Letter

SPEAKER_13 1:44:41

yeah, we kind of moved on with the defense. We brought out the experts for a doctor in GPS, phenomenal guy. Um, his name is I'll I'll say his name because he's he's fantastic, Dr. Chaz Dixon. Like the stuff he has done and the stuff he knows, he's a numbers guy. He just follows what the evidence says. If the evidence says guilty, it says guilty. And his verdict was this is the ropiest bit of GPS data we've seen. And this is the kind of guy who they go, Well, we've arrested someone. Can you look at his phone? And within a few minutes, he's going, he was like walking around a wooded area last night at 2 a.m., go and have a look. And then they dig up and find a body. You know, he's that kind of guy. Uh, really good expert. And then I had a speed camera expert as well, um, Billy Campbell, who was ex-police, who kind of uh, you know, they call it like gamekeeper turned poacher, went onto the other side and then defensing, you know.

SPEAKER_14 1:45:23

And then what I found interesting at this point in the trial is that you had an officer from America write you the best reference letter and also why you had all this equipment in your car and why it's to the betterment of the police, because you went over there and did this memorial run, which was the greatest letter, most American thing ever, right?

SPEAKER_13 1:45:46

Yeah, I mean, uh, so yeah, there was a there was a big kind of glowing sort of problem, which was well, when they've seized the car, nearly 12 months after the alleged offense, there's a fuel cell in the back, there's a radar detector, there's laser jammers, you know, I think there's like some binoculars in there, and there's a light system, you know, a hazard light system in there. And they're like, right, you can put all the speed cameras to one side, look to the jury and go, why else would he have this stuff? Why would you need to drive 500 miles without stopping? You know what I mean, on this island, right? And there was, you know, what am I supposed to say, right? They couldn't comprehend any sort of answer it have. But I had been invited to the CTC Express in 2018. And I was prepping the car, and I was gonna go, I was gonna take the Audi, you know, at some point I was gonna take the Audi to the States. So the car's all equipped to go to the States, but the car's taken off by the police. So that just sounds like I've made it up on the spot. How can I back this up? Well, I did the CTC Express in 2019, met a load of great people, you know, got introduced to the charity, which is the Cannonball Memorial Run, which raised money for fallen police officers. Thing we've never even comprehended in this country. Do you know what I mean? Again, it must be a gun thing, but we don't really think about police officers getting gunned down. Where in the States, obviously, it's such a common thing. And I thought it was a really good charity as well, because it was like immediate relief to the families. I thought that's really good. Anyway, I got on really well with the guys at the CTC Express. And one of the sergeants there, Sergeant James Snow, we kept in contact. He was, you know, I was saying, I'm thinking of maybe leaving the Jag in California. And then it was on a 12-month temporary import, so I ended up bringing it home. But we sort of stayed in contact. And I was like, I did contact Ben, Charlie Safari Wilson, and he says, Yeah, I'll write you a letter. Yeah. And I said, Well, I'll ask Sergeant Snow to see if he'll just back up what I was doing there and stuff. The letter he wrote is phenomenal, but it's Hollywood, right? It doesn't, it doesn't seem real because one, for us in the UK, he is a hot, he's chips, isn't he? He's California Highway Patrol. So it's just movie movie reference here. He gave us his CV with it as well, which was SWAT and accident investigation and all this sort of stuff. And he wrote this letter, you know, letter-headed from the San Bernardino Police Department. And it just basically explained it went through Mr. Davis was invited to in 2018, 2019 to raise money for foreign police officers. It's a charity rally from New York to LA or Connecticut, LA in 2019. Fuel cells are quite common in some of the western parts of the state, choose along roads. Many of the cars have fuel cells, so we're not stopping all the time. Radar and laser defense things are quite common. In eastern parts of the US, they have illegal speed traps. And this is coming from a sergeant, right? Like the whole shebang, right? For if any UK listeners, it's just he's it's the brown shirt, it's the big hat, as American as you can get. And then he writes this whole letter explaining everything why the car would be equipped like that. And then he signs it off with, I believe more people should be like Mr. Davis, right? And it was just like, oh my god, this is just amazing. Well, you can imagine the prosecution did not want this letter being read out at all. Now, I would have flown Sergeant Snow here, but it was COVID. You just couldn't fly anywhere, right? So I was like, well, video link or anything like that. The prosecution led us to believe we'll let the letter be read in court. No problem. Comes to the day where I want to read the letter, so I stand up, I want to enter this into evidence and reach the jury. Prosecution stand up and they make a big song and dance about it not being read because it's basically a witness statement and the witness isn't here. Do you know what I mean? And they were trying to make a thing about it. And again, the judge being fair, he was like, When did you have this letter? And they were like, Oh, we've had it seven months or so. You wanted to raise this concern seven months ago. And the judge knew he, you know, he's read the letter, he can see why it's important to the case. And he says, I just sort of see it as a character reference, and Mr. Davis can proceed. So I had to read this out to the jury. Um, and you see them all making notes. I mean, I wish I could have flown him there in his uniform and just had him in the stand there. Oh, he would have loved it too. I can only imagine when the prosecution and the police had to sit down. They had many conferences. Um, this case even had its own operation name. It was Operation Hawledge. So they pick names for it, like Operation U Tree, which is a big famous one, and different sort of operations. This was Operation Hawledge. Now, apparently the names are assigned randomly, but I always thought it was because he was hauling ass. Do you know what I mean? But uh you Yeah, so it had up, and they must have sat down there and gone, well, Tommy's saying that he needed this stuff for a race in America, a rally, and and yeah, likewise. And then the letters turned up from that, and they go, they must have thought it was fake. They must have. James, uh Sergeant James Snow said he never got contacted by them, but I wonder if they did check to see if he was genuinely an officer. Because you know what I mean. So uh Well, they would have at least Googled it, or you know.

SPEAKER_14 1:50:23

They must have. They must have. There's many lists in the world that uh check that it's real.

SPEAKER_13 1:50:27

Yeah, but they never contacted him unless they caught it at the department. But yes, um, but no, uh, Sergeant James Snow, he's retired now, really good guy, awesome guy, legend, legend in the cannibal community as well, because you know, he's he's right in with the accident investigation team. Um, and like he knows ins and outs of all that sort of stuff. And again, he goes back to, you know, if everyone was more like cannibal drivers, I wouldn't be going too many accidents. Do you see what I mean? We've got a jury of 12 come in. There was a big, almost like legal error that was completely out of our hands, where one of the jury members wasn't sworn in properly. And on the second day, we nearly had a mistrial and they had to they had to contact the Ministry of Justice, and it was a big hoo-ha. And then it basically became my decision whether he can be sworn in now or a mistrial and have an and have a go next year. So I was like, swear him in. He was like 18. I was like, yes, you might as well have had like a Ferrari top on, you know, it was that kind of guy, you know. Yeah, so the jury, yeah. So in the UK, um, you do normally need a uh unanimous jury, but the judge can accept uh majority, which would be, you know, 10 or more, basically, you know. So that's how it would be. So um it was a week-long trial. So

Closing Statement And The Verdict

SPEAKER_13 1:51:32

Monday through Thursday was pretty much finished. And then I asked the, I had to do a closing statement. So I asked the judge, could my closing statement be on Friday? And then something was brought up again completely. We had no clue about this, but there's a section of law where if someone represents that these are like caveats that all have to be ticked for this rule to kick in, and unbeknownst to us it had, which was if you represent yourself and there's no witnesses of fact, which is they weren't witnesses from the day, they're just expert witnesses, the prosecution aren't automatically entitled to a closing statement. It's at the judge's discretion. So the judge just is just reading through, you know, I guess it's you know, procedural again, and he goes, the prosecution, uh, due to part 25 of the CPR uh will not be having a closing statement. So now this is probably half two on a Thursday. And, you know, then maybe they're expecting me to go straight into this closing statement. I said, Your Honor, if possible, could we adjourn for tomorrow morning for the closing statement? And he went, looked at the clock, you know, it's coming up three o'clock. And he goes, Yes, we'll adjourn tomorrow. Uh, you'll have half an hour tomorrow to do your closing statement, which in one word sounds a long time, but also sounds a short time. You don't really know 30 minutes, like you know, you've got to do a closing statement for 30 minutes. So we go back home, uh, which we were staying in a hotel down the road. Staff were really nice there, because at this point now, from Tuesday onwards, the press have got it. So it's on the radio, it's in the papers. So um, you know, there's kind of press reporters there. And what we realized is in the court, because it was COVID as well, you couldn't have many in the public gallery, but they were phoning in effectively. So on the screen, you could see like different court chambers that were listening in. Because I think they were interested in this sort of legal case because the charges weren't like the speeding charges were uh, you know, Mr. Davis is charged with dangerous driving due to speeding within the United Kingdom. It wasn't a specific road or a specific location. I think it was the first case where someone had been like charged with speeding of a country rather than a specific road or location. Normally it would say M6 Junction 5, where this was somewhere in the United Kingdom, it was very vague. So I think there was a little legal interest in it, and obviously represented myself, and there was, you know, the little kind of interesting little court things in there.

SPEAKER_14 1:53:36

There's a bunch of legal theories that could set what I would think very dangerous precedents. Just there's these blanket things, there's these strange legal theories that are going on. So of course the media has an interest, but what did you think? Seeing, you know, BBC and whatever on these screens, it must have been surreal for you.

SPEAKER_13 1:53:51

Yeah, it was again, you know, this wasn't a nice week. Do you know what I mean? Like you go home and you've got no appetite, like when I mean home, back to this hotel that we were in. Like again, because it was it was COVID, everywhere was empty down there. It's a bit of a touristy town, so they had lots of availability. So we ended up having like really cheap rooms, but it was like a little apartment, had one each, just weren't hungry, had no appetite, you were drained because you've been up early, you've gone back late. It's December, so it's dark at four, right? And it's just like it's just draining, right? And I remember, you know, uh, I think it was on the Wednesday walking out of court and thinking nothing of it. And a guy from the Sun newspaper picture the like proper paparazzo, you know, the like fishing jacket on, just runs out from this bush in the corner with a big camera and takes a picture of me and my buddy walking out. We're like, whoa, like that. And he was like, you know, it was what's that for? It was like sun newspaper, anything wanna say? I'm like, oh no, this is getting horrible now. It's getting tacky and just a bit like it's gonna, you know what I mean? And at this point, you've got no way where it's going. Again, at this point, my daughter's six weeks old, seven weeks old. So my wife's at home with a newborn, you know, and you're very much like still thinking, you know, but it's gonna be fine. But from Wednesday, you felt like this could go very wrong. I remember having a big wobble on the Thursday, I think. Was it the Wednesday night where I was saying to my mate, I was like, I can't do this anymore. This is this is getting this is going out of hand. Do you know what I mean? They're breaking me, you know.

SPEAKER_14 1:55:03

And then here you are. The pressure of writing a closing statement, which is the coup de grace of everything. You're in this hotel room and then you have to go back. What does that feel like? You're gonna argue for your freedom.

SPEAKER_13 1:55:14

Yeah, I like I've never been good at homework, right? Like, if any of my past teachers, I don't think I ever submitted homework. Even at university, it got bad. Like, I just can't motivate myself. However, you would think this would be enough motivation to write, you know, write your heart out. I remember sitting there and just like, just can't do it. Like, I can't uh one, because this has got to be verbalized, right? It's not, it's not something you hand over. So I remember it must have been half a page, and there were bullet points, right? There was like seven bullet points on that, just to try and cover these points. And then we came to a point where we're like, let's just get to bed. Rest will be better than spending ages. So we might have got to bed at like midnight, 1 a.m. Can't really remember. Had a Domino's pizza and just went to bed next morning, got up, go into court, and it's basically there's only one thing, it's closing statement time. So probably at half nine, 10. I think I did it from I didn't, because this is the other thing, right? Normally you'd be in the dock the whole time, which is at the back of the court in like a glass cage, effectively. But because I'm representing myself, I can't be there. I'm at the front next to the prosecution. And then when I'm giving evidence, I've got to go in the dock. But then there's no one to ask me questions. So it's kind of a monologue directly at the jury. It's almost like, although you can represent yourself, the structure's not there for representing yourself. It's kind of like, oh, we're missing a player here, it's not working, which kind of can work in your favor. The other thing is a jury, they are like-minded people. They're not legal professions. You know, they are just normal people, never been in a court before, possibly, and they speak our language. And I think what we were realizing early on is the prosecutor was very flowery with his language, very sort of Queen's English. There was a point where I was, you know, in the newspapers they said that the car had been upgraded. Uh, the suspension had been upgraded, and the car had been upgraded to 400 to break horsepower. Uh, we had a report done with the car that was still in police custody all this time for two years outside under a tree, and they said it was all stock. And I was reading this, and I must have said something like the suspension was stock. And the prosecutor cut across me in a very pompous voice, and he'd have like the his reading glasses, and he'd be chewing on the end of them, and he would say, read it verbatim. And I was like, I oh, sorry. And I'd go, oh, the suspension struts were all stock, made no material difference. And I think it didn't play well with the jury. They were like, Why did you need to do that? They probably thought, Why are you trying to cut across him and upset his flow or something? And it was not a point that needed clarifying, really. Suspension, suspension, strut. The bottom line is the car's all stock. So if the newspaper's wrong about that, maybe it's wrong about a lot of other things, you know? So yeah, we get there and I have to stand up now. And this is apart from giving evidence, it's I'm very close to the jury now. When I was giving evidence on the other side of the room looking across, because the defense is on the right hand side and the jury's on the right-hand side, it's almost like if I'm looking forward, there's 12 of them. I've really got to look to the left and the right to see all 12. And then I think I gave like a 25-minute closing statement. Again, I can't really remember what I said. I kind of went into the detail, pointed out all the holes in the case, you know, thanked them really for whatever their decision is, bringing this to an end. Because at least there was there was a bit of comfort of going, right, whatever the outcome, it's over today. Do you know what I mean? Over in over in the uncertainty, because we're going to be certain about what's happening next. Do you know what I mean? So I did the closing statement from what I heard from what my friend, he said it was, it was great. And then they go and adjourn for for a decision.

SPEAKER_14 1:58:37

Before you went to the court, you had to prepare yourself that because the judge was the way he was. If you are found guilty, he's going to sentence you right there. Yeah. And you, and you could potentially just be not marched off to the gallows, but you know, marched off to a hole somewhere for a couple of years.

SPEAKER_13 1:58:52

Uh yeah. My barrister friend, obviously, we've been speaking at most tonight. She was like, it's likely this judge would would know enough about you there and then to sentence you, especially with it being start of the day. You know, they're like, we've got plenty of time left. Let's just get it over with now. Why drag this out till Monday? You know, or another day. You know, court time's precious. There's likely he would go, thank you for the jury, off you go. I stay in that dock and you know, be sentenced. But so I give the closing statement. Um, the jury then are dismissed to go and to reach a verdict. This must have been midday now, 11 o'clock, something like that. So we we leave the room, we go and have lunch, and we're just sat there waiting now. We're just waiting and waiting and waiting. And then we're about two, what's about an hour in on the Tanoy? All parties in uh R versus Davis report to court one. In court two, there'd been a big murder trial on the same time. This is the level we're at. Like when we'd go for lunch, we're with like the victim of the murder's family or the family of the murderers, you know, like it's tense in there. It's weird. You could go in there with no context, and you can just feel the tension in this kind of hall and room. It's um, yeah. So about an hour we're called back in. We're like, wow, that's quick. Is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. And I walk in, and the judge straight away says they've not reached a verdict, which is quite nice. He didn't leave me in limbo. They want to clarify something. So I'm back to the front, the jury come in, the judge basically says, um, there's a letter that they want to be read. Now, the jury, the roots to verdict, like I didn't know this um until it was like the day off. The jury members are given a very simplistic, like dumbed-down document, which is, and for my case, it was if you believe Mr. Davis drove his Audi S5 car from John A Grossaland's end, go to question one. If you think no, you must acquit him, right? And it's just as simple as that. They've they've narrowed this case down to a very simplistic question. And the his was added by the judge at the last minute. It was if you believe Mr. Davis drove an Audi S5 car, you must acquit him. But at the last minute, the judge added his, which is a very key point because there was a lot of doubt of whether it was my Audi, a friend's Audi. There's a lot of S5s, the registration documents on one of the S5s that were involved changed ownership on that day. There was a lot of conflicting things there. You know, I'm paraphrasing a week-long trial here. But one of the key bits was back to those Scottish officers who caught me speeding the night before. They're the only officers on the day who saw me driving a car, right? And as the police said, it's a very distinct car. Now, they had said in their letter that I had told them I was driving to John of Groats and then down to Land's End. Not true, right? Uh, I didn't say that. And if I was doing what they think I'm doing, who would tell the police the night before? It's like, where are you going? I'm off to rob a bank tomorrow, right?

SPEAKER_14 2:01:29

This is where I'll be, and you know this is the one road, and you can just sit there with your radar guy.

SPEAKER_13 2:01:33

It's it's wild, right? So um, you know, I had footage of the drive up there where you could clearly see I said, Oh, I'm gonna do the North Coast 500. I'm just traveling around, just you know, there was nothing to sync. But I couldn't show that video because they were like, Where's the rest of the video? Right? Do you know what I mean? It would be a bit odd. But um, yeah, so they had written in their statement that I had said that. And I disputed that because I was like, well, I didn't say that. And then at the bottom of the letter, he said, however, reading his article, he's read the news, he's clearly at it. Now, this showed a real bias on the police's officers because he's obviously read the article, then re-remembered what was said, and then sent the letter down. And it was a I'm and then he also said at the bottom, but I'm really sorry. This is an email to the police officer, I'm really sorry. I didn't see any modifications or nothing of note in that car. And my uh speed camera expert, who was ex-police traffic officer, he said they would have smelt it as well. He said, if you've got an 80-litre, dangerous, as they would say, unvented fuel cell, it'd be stinking. And it's right, he said it would be stinking, right? And they never mentioned that. So I remembered, like the prosecution, obviously, wanted to put that letter in. I said, Well, I want the police to come up to be witnesses. They didn't turn up on the day. So the compromise was the judge says, Well, we'll redact what Mr. Davis doesn't like. So we redacted the Lanz End John Ogroates thing that I never said, and that was about it. Everything else, I said, No, show him that. And this was the one confirmation they wanted. They wanted this letter because this was key. Now, is it his car? And the judge says, I can't show you the letter for legal reasons because it's been redacted, obviously, but I'll read it to you. And he reads it all out. And he and the judge almost emphasizes, I'm sorry, I didn't see anything of note or any modifications with that car. And then they off went. I did make a big thing out of my closing statement about, you know, 15-year routine traffic officer. He would have smelt it, he would have seen it. These are the things they're trained for. They can see a bowl tire a mile away, and you're saying he's there talking to me through the thing, and he can't see police dash. That would match the same as his dash. It's not my car, is it? You know, you can't prove it's my car, it's not my car. So they went, okay, and they went away, back out, and the wait begins again. I think it was three hours after that. Yeah, it was four hours and eight minutes. Because I think, yeah, one of my friends said it was um like four minutes longer than OJ's trial, something like that, or four minutes less than OJ Simpson's trial to reach a verdict. And we get called back in. There has

Aftermath And The “Allegedly” Record

SPEAKER_13 2:03:47

been a verdict reach. This time I can't go to the front. I'm now put into the glass dock, and I've got to empty my pockets, my phone, you know, and I'm that's all put in a case. And this is the room where to the right goes to the van, which takes you down to processing to become an inmate. And to the left is freedom, right? My eight-week-old baby, everything like that. You know, again, play stupid games, you win stupid prizes, right? And we stand there and they go, Have you reached a verdict? And yes, we have. Is it unanimous? No, it's not. So then there's a bit of a quiet the judge, the judge says, I will accept a majority verdict. And the judge is like, this has gone on enough, right? So we're now thinking, Well, is it two people are saying not guilty, and eight are saying we don't know, you're trying to guess, and there's no way, you can't Google this sort of stuff. So we're looking around, there's the the Karen, if you like, that we thought is down the other end there. They're all wearing face masks, but she's staring at me, right? And I'm like, oh my god. And they go, right, foreman stands up, never thought it was gonna be who it was. Little lad, sort of in the back, one middle-aged man steps up, and um on the count one, do we find him guilty or not guilty? Not guilty. I'm like, oh my god. And then the next thing it sounded like they sped through it. It was just not guilty, not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. And then it was just real quick, it was just like, okay, Mr. Davis, you're free to go. The judge got up, walked out, because now it's like 10 to 5, right? It's home time, isn't it? Judge just got up, walked out. The uh I had two bailiffs next to me, like bodyguards, right, who were there for obviously criminals to not, you know. He kind of puts me on my shoulder and he's like, Good lad, do you know what I mean? Because he sat the he sat there for the whole trial and he's like, Go get your car, mate. And he's buzzing about it, right? And I'm like, oh my god, it's just shock. And then I'm like, uh, you know, going around. The lady who's leaving, all the jury are sort of walking out now. The judges thanked them for their service and everything like that. I'm sort of trying to get, I have to go through this room near where the van would have been, if you like, get my stuff to come back in. While that's happening, the jury are all leaving. My friend who's been with me through the whole thing, he's kind of looking at him. The lady, the the Karen, as we thought, gave him the nicest sort of, I mean, she was wearing a mask, but you know when someone's smiling, she gave a real nice sort of nod and smile, and just sort of like a, you know, thank you sort of thing, you know? And it kind of shocked, it was like, oh, maybe she wasn't. Unless it was a sarcastic one, I don't know. But yeah, so it was 10 to 2. I it could have been 11 to 1, I don't know, but it wasn't a unanimous one. By the time I've got my phone and keys back in my pocket, walked back into the glass booth and back out, place is dead. The only person who's left is a clerk, my friend, the prosecutor, who's staring up to the left. I chuck his hand and sort of, you know, wished him well at the end of the case once they'd gone to verdict. So walk out, we go to this little holding room, just in absolute shock. Can't believe it, right? There's press all outside the room as soon as we walk out trying to get a comment or something like that. Uh, we go in this little room, I said, let's just get a taxi, let's get a book of taxi. Obviously, you know, uh, my phone's been off the whole time, so I've not turned my phone on yet. My buddies uh rang a taxi to take us back down. Sort of come out and there's stairs going down, and there's like um camera tripods and stuff. We're like, and they went, oh no, that murder trial next door, right? That's that's finished today. It's been a not guilty verdict, they're there for that, aren't they? So we walk out, walk down the stairs. It wasn't for the murder victim, it was for us. They're doing a live to studio thing with ITV Southwest or something, where they're going, we're live outside the court, it's been found not guilty, there's all cameras, we jump in this minibus and just go down there, and we're like, this is wild. Absolutely wild. And it had, you know, it had been in the newspaper every day, and then national news that night. And it was on, we put on radio two that evening, like the news at seven o'clock.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:23

A man who claims to have made the fastest car journey between John O'Groats and Land's End has been cleared of dangerous driving. Truero Crown Court heard that Thomas Davies from North Wales completed the 841-mile journey in nine hours and thirty-six minutes, an average speed of 89 miles per hour. Helena Wilkinson reports.

SPEAKER_01 2:07:43

Prosecutors told the court the journey would have taken 15 hours if a driver kept within the speed limits. The jury heard the car was fitted with various electronic devices, including a speed camera detection system. Mr. Davies wrote a blog about the journey and appeared in national newspapers and on the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2. But during the trial, the 29-year-old who represented himself in court saying the prosecution's case was circumstantial.

SPEAKER_13 2:08:15

You know, we kept all these audio clips because they still blow our mind. We listen back to them now and again and go, that's wild, that isn't it? Um, so we get back to the hotel, you know, it's probably six-ish now, and we're like, Do we want to drive five hours back now? And we're like, tell you what, Land's End Hotel is an hour and twenty from the court. We're like, I can book in. We can book in, you know, it's cheap because no one's here because of COVID and stuff. We're key workers, no matter. And we went down to the Land's End Hotel. We had a steak dinner in the Lands End Hotel, hell of a storm all night because it's right on the rocky edge outcrop of the UK. And we had a steak dinner there, had a great night's sleep, slept so deep, woke up the next morning, had a little wander around, got in the car, got, I think I sent a postcard back. Yeah, I sent a postpar postcard back to my wife because I sent a postcard to my wife from John of Groats three years earlier. And it was a key piece of evidence, right, to prove I was in John of Groats. They'd seized it. So I sent one from Land's End, and it was like three years later, you know, sort of thing, kind of a nice circle. And then we drove back up, and yeah, it was just a surreal moment. It still hasn't really said anyway. It doesn't seem weird. You look back on it, you know, you sometimes come across letters or documents, and you're like, that was wild. But yeah, that was that was sort of the case there.

SPEAKER_14 2:09:26

So that time, the hypothetical time, it still holds today.

SPEAKER_13 2:09:30

Yes, yeah, allegedly, yeah. Um, there has been an attempt quite recently to do it. Um, say, you know, mutual friends of friends have done it. Um, knowing what they know now as well, it's wild. Do you know what I mean? To go, are you really gonna do it? Um, again, going back to that sort of diplomatic immunity. I think that's the only way you could go, really. Um, but even Europe, Europe's not far enough away. Do you know what I mean? You'd have to be on some American plate.

SPEAKER_07 2:09:54

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention? I've just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story. And I need all of you to stop what you're doing and listen.

Support The Show And Grab A Beer

SPEAKER_07 2:10:08

Cannonballers!

SPEAKER_17 2:10:10

Hey Canon Bullers, thanks for subscribing to our podcast. We appreciate it. If you're not a cheap Canadian and want to buy us a coffee, head on over to buymeacoffee.com. Or better yet, buy us a case of sweet ass craft IPA.com. Links are in the show notes. Now, back to the riveting podcast in progress.

SPEAKER_14 2:10:34

And

Post Interview Reactions And Rants

SPEAKER_14 2:10:35

we are back. First of all, what about those two Karen's on the BBC, those two Kevins? Well, I'm gonna write a firmly worded letter to all the police constables and chiefs. Firmly worded letter. I'm gonna send that right out. What a bunch of weenies.

SPEAKER_15 2:10:51

I swear this is the problem with this world. You know what's interesting is um he didn't even play into that. He just answered the questions and he was a gentleman the whole way through, even though they were totally baiting him. He was just chill. He just answered the questions, and then actually in the interview, I was listening to him when he's being asked, and then the auto quality in that interview that he was on BBC with was, of course, professionally edited and recorded. And then it switched over to him interviewing and talking with you. That was the next thing after that interview, is he came in and I was like, Am I in the interview? And then I then quickly I realized because of the context, it was you. It was a conversation he was having with you. But I missed the segue between the the conversation with BBC where they're baiting him, and the conversation where he's just talking to you. Because of course it's the same guy talking in a different time, but also well recorded and edited.

SPEAKER_14 2:11:41

Actually, I had to doctor those uh not doctor, I had to improve the audio of those BBC clips. I had to put it through a bunch of processes. But and I also found real interesting that he cites the long way round as being a bit of an inspiration for his automotive exploits. So it was really cool that motorcycle series ends up being a motivation for this young man. Yeah, so true. So true. And the last thing was, who is this friend, by the way? So the friend that stuck with him through the whole trial, obviously, I think we can infer that maybe that's the same guy that did the attempt with him. I'm not sure. What an amazing dude this guy is. Stand-up guy. You find anyone to even answer your phone call at dinner hour. This guy shows up through the whole trial, puts his freedom on the line. And then by the way, Tommy never gives up who that other guy is.

SPEAKER_15 2:12:35

Who the other guy was, right?

SPEAKER_14 2:12:37

Right. And I'm like, both these guys are stand-up dudes. And this is a rarity in this world. So uh I just want to point out who that friend was and how good of a friend Tommy is. And as a matter of fact, at the end of the next interview, I am genuine in saying that if you ever need a co-pilot, he can call me and I'll definitely go on one of these adventures with him. Because I know you know that he's never going to throw you under the bus. And you know that there's no point of ever throwing him under the bus either, because he's never gonna do that to you.

SPEAKER_15 2:13:05

No, that's very true. Oh, hang on a second. Somebody's asking me a question here. Hang on. Saying like a canary. Who was who who was who was the other driver? Oh, who was in the car with me? No, that was Aaron. Okay, I'm back.

SPEAKER_14 2:13:18

Here's his number, his date of birth.

SPEAKER_16 2:13:22

Sorry, bro. Sorry. Sorry, I'm sorry. Yeah.

SPEAKER_14 2:13:27

And the other thing that drove me crazy the whole time, my blood was just boiling was how the police, like these guys, you know, I'm I'm the police and I never lied. They totally subverted the law. They lied about everything, non-stop lying, and the prosecutors non-stop lying. And it just goes to show how two-faced every justice system is. The judge even catches the cops and the prosecutors lying, and they weren't immediately taken away in handcuffs. As a matter of fact, they weren't even treated remotely the same way. Tommy gets his house raided and taken off and gets booked. These prosecutors and cops lie in court. The judge catches them, and where's all the police rolling in with handcuffs, taking them away? It's such a bullshit system.

SPEAKER_15 2:14:23

Yeah, that does happen around the world. And it's it's you know, it's it's worse in a lot of countries, right? If you look at what's happening in the never mind. Moving on, never moving right along.

SPEAKER_14 2:14:37

My last thing was, I'm sorry, I'm kind of hijacking this, just because I'm just so excited about it. And by the way, who's this guy? Alex Roy. Alex Roy. I've bought every one of his books, I've watched his movie, I've read a bunch of articles. He holds the three-wheel cannonball record, by the way, currently, and he did it in a Morgan, an antique Morgan. So I got a lot of research to do, but I feel like Alex Roy needs to make an appearance on this podcast. But I'm gonna air this, I'm gonna send it to him, and I'm gonna do a bunch of research. I'm not sure. It feels like you need about just like Tommy, you need two or three episodes just to dive into each one of these interesting topics. And um the one interesting topic I'm uh is is is in the forefront of my mind is the three-wheel cannonball record. Yeah, very cool.

SPEAKER_15 2:15:29

And um, you don't know anybody else who's looking for a cannonball record, do you?

SPEAKER_14 2:15:33

Well, yeah, if we ever get it done, so we're trying, we're trying. But we have a date. It's uh like a month from now.

SPEAKER_15 2:15:39

All right, cool. Let's talk about Aaron's rideouts.

Boar’s Nest Rideout Recommendation

SPEAKER_15 2:15:43

So the Boar's Nest in South Dakota, it is a 2027 USA paved checkpoint.

SPEAKER_14 2:15:50

And it's worth the ride out. So in the middle of America, right there, near Sturgis, and all of that great riding. It's a day ride destination for anyone in Sturgis or anyone in that area, the Mount Rushmore area. So I just wanted to point out that they've done some renovations and it's really a fantastic place if you want a destination when you're in the area.

SPEAKER_15 2:16:12

Very cool. Um, here's some other interesting things to think about. Uh

Awards Banquet Invite Details

SPEAKER_15 2:16:17

ADB Cannonball News. It's really funny that um that you have this top line item in here about people attending, because I just had an inquiry from someone who said, Hey, I can't make the rally, but I'm living and I live in Monterey, California. I want to come into the awards banquet. So what news should I share with them?

SPEAKER_14 2:16:37

Yeah. So basically, anyone who's ever been in a rally, so any alumni, you're obviously welcome to come, right? Just pay the at cost ticket price. So it costs me around 75 bucks, depending on what's happening that awards banquet. If you just email me, reach out to me, say, hey, you know, this is number so-and-so, and I want to come, that's fine. Anyone also who's signed up for a future event. So I have some guys that are pretty excited about 2027, and we haven't even done 2026. So you're also welcome to come. And I guess if there are people on the periphery who know us or something like that, just yeah, just reach out to me, just pay me the at cost ticket price, and you're obviously more than welcome to hang out. And I make a point of I realize sometimes some of our venues are smaller, but in Monterey and in Astoria, they're really big venues. So the more the merrier. Yeah, please come out. And um is there a dress code, Aaron? Absolutely. If you got an ugly blazer, you know, you're gonna have more respect.

SPEAKER_15 2:17:38

Sport it. That's right. There's gonna be the ugly blazer contest, and there will be no award for this, Aaron, just so you know. But there will be there will be there will be an obligatory group photo shot, a group photo with all of the ugly blazers.

SPEAKER_14 2:17:52

If someone wants to volunteer, please don't give me more projects.

SPEAKER_15 2:17:55

Yes, assuming that there's yeah, I'm assuming somebody in the room has a smartphone with a camera.

SPEAKER_14 2:18:01

Absolutely. And by the way, if you do show up, it is a cash bar because I cannot afford the degenerates that are involved in this. I can't afford your your bar bills. I can't afford my own.

SPEAKER_15 2:18:10

What do you think? It's a uh you think it's a gumball 3,000 or something? Oh my god, those guys party. Oh my god. Unbelievable party. Anytime you have a like an event where you just get information to drive an hour and a half to an airport and they load your vehicle on an Antonov says that it's a it's a high dollar event.

SPEAKER_14 2:18:31

Actually, I just saw an article that they're building some planes that are bigger than those Antonovs, which I think they're all gone now. But uh, you know, there's light at the end of the tunnel because just like the F1 races, they fly all the cars around the world, right? Yeah. So in my mind, eventually one day, I think there should be a motorcycle gumball. But I, you know, we're just a different breed of people. We're a little more gritty. But I think there's a subculture of gumball-esque type of escapades that could be had one day.

SPEAKER_15 2:19:04

I like that. Something to aspire for. Speaking of aspiring for something, we've had a a lot of people, even in uh some of the other podcasts about this event, people call it a

2027 Adds A Closed-Course Race

SPEAKER_15 2:19:18

race. And even people who participated in this, they say, well, during the race, we both know it's not a race, it's a rally. With the exception of this big news, we have an actual race day. Can you tell us about it?

SPEAKER_14 2:19:32

So I have no comment on the preamble to that, but I will say that that it is an actual race. So in 2027, in day three, we have a partnership with a closed dirt park, and they have a racetrack set up. So on day three, there is two off-road checkpoints, optional off-road checkpoints. And yes, I am not gonna give you the details, but on day three, I think it's from 9 to 10 a.m., it is a race.

SPEAKER_15 2:20:08

Nice. Oh, I'm excited. I'm I'm I'm super excited about that. That sounds very cool.

SPEAKER_14 2:20:12

Yeah, I'm not gonna give with the details to anyone, but it is an actual race, and there will be bonus points for the winner of said race.

SPEAKER_15 2:20:21

What do you say? We talk about some new signups that may or may not have resulted from your viral post.

SPEAKER_14 2:20:29

Absolutely. And I will leave it to the person with fluency.

SPEAKER_15 2:20:37

And where's where's that person?

SPEAKER_14 2:20:39

You that's it, buddy. That's it.

New 2027 Signups Shoutouts

SPEAKER_15 2:20:44

2027 USA rally. Leo Masaro from Las Vegas, Nevada on his 1300 GSA in the Pro class. Barry Crawford from Plymouth, Massachusetts on his trans Honda Trans Alp Mile Crusher class. Welcome back, Barry. Christoph, Christophe, if you pronounce it in Swedish, Christophe Bach from Temecula. Thank you, God. Temecula, California in the Mile Crusher class on his 1250 GSA. Jerry S. from Marlanton, West Virginia, on his 1300 GSA Mile Crusher class. Simon Alway, you made it in, buddy. Fantastic. I know you couldn't make it in uh in the 2026. Simon Alway is a buddy of mine from years ago when I was a when I was managing uh super yachts, and he was chief officer. I think he's running his own boat now. Um, but he couldn't get the rotation, so it's rotating in, rotating out, and he couldn't get the rotation to work for the 2026, but he got into the 2027. So welcome Simon from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on his Suzuki V-strum in Mile Crusher class.

SPEAKER_14 2:21:56

We better have some yacht stories. Maybe we'll get together for some field notes after a few adult beverages at the awards banquet and maybe get some yacht stories out of them.

SPEAKER_15 2:22:04

I think he's probably got some too. Nice. Rabbit from Trumble, Connecticut, on his to be determined. But the good news is that whatever his to be determined is, once it is determined, it will have a sidecar and he will be in the mile crusher class.

SPEAKER_14 2:22:21

And if he shows up with a sidecar, which he's indicated with a passenger, by the way, if he does show up, he will be the first. So I'm all about the first. I'm excited about the guy with the scooter. I'm excited about someone with a sidecar. By the way, we don't have a Morgan who's ever signed up. You know, I'm looking forward to all these firsts.

SPEAKER_15 2:22:38

Nice. So this is not a first. We got Matt Fletcher from Speedway, Indiana on his Multistrata 1260. He's back from the 2025 rally. Welcome. Matt also had a sweet, very sweet, ugly blazer.

SPEAKER_14 2:22:53

He did, and he was a badass and super nice guy, and he has the only Ducati in this year's rally so far.

SPEAKER_15 2:23:01

So far. Jesse Friedman from Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore, Maryland, very close to my hometown of Annapolis, Maryland, on a Nordine 901 rally joins in the Pro Class.

SPEAKER_14 2:23:14

Nice. Welcome, guys. Yeah, thanks very much. None of this happens without you guys. So I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_15 2:23:19

It seems like uh I was waiting for you to say none of this happens without a viral without a viral post.

SPEAKER_14 2:23:24

No, but it's important because it reaches out to these like-minded people, right? And at the end of the day, absolutely. And at the end of the day, they're trusting that you know, we're gonna show up. We had we had a funny interaction, you and I, with someone on Facebook where they said, oh man, should I sign up for 2027? And he's someone who signed up for 2026. And we're both like, hey, listen, it'd be nice to have turn to profit one day. Let's just make sure you survive 2026. Let's just make sure that you're happy with the way everything goes, right? So if you are signed up for 2026, don't panic. There's plenty of tickets left. And uh, you know, although I would like to have some revenue going on.

SPEAKER_15 2:24:01

Well, 2027. 2026 is sold out. You said 2026. 2027, there's plenty of tickets left.

SPEAKER_14 2:24:08

Oh man, the Pilsner is getting me here. Yeah. So if you are signed up for 2026, don't rush. Because you might hate me by the end of 2026, right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_16 2:24:18

Yeah, I mean, people might hate you by the end of this podcast.

SPEAKER_14 2:24:21

I'm sure many do. So, you know, welcome back.

SPEAKER_16 2:24:24

As long as you subscribe and welcome back, keep listening.

SPEAKER_14 2:24:26

By the way, we are listed on Patreon and we are listed on buy me a coffee. So if you, you know, hate listen, just you know, chip in five bucks a month.

SPEAKER_15 2:24:34

Hey, what about uh beer, the beer thing? Come on, we've had some cases of beer still, aren't we?

SPEAKER_14 2:24:39

It's uh buy me a coffee. So, but I've changed the option to buy me a beer because you know I'm a degenerate. Well, fair enough, you know. Never change. No.

SPEAKER_15 2:24:50

Why?

SPEAKER_16 2:24:50

I can see that five percent is really knocking you out of your seat there.

SPEAKER_14 2:24:53

Listen, what's coming up in the next episode?

Next Releases And Final Notes

SPEAKER_15 2:24:56

Round table with Carrie and Bo Ernest. Oh, great. We'll be second to another round table. Another, yeah, 10 to 15% pushing the numbers, man. Um, Tommy's Gumball 3000. We talked about that earlier. And again, we talked about this on the last on the last podcast. So you interviewed him in Wales, or you interviewed him, he was in Wales at the time. And then he ended up in that in that interview, he talked about his inspiration and the Gumball 3000 and how when he was a kid, he went to the hotel in London and he broke into the garage. And I'm spoiling, I'm I'm spoiler alert from some of the things that are coming up in the next episode. But then, then in the time that you talk to him, he gets an invitation from the man himself.

SPEAKER_14 2:25:38

It's the most, you know, Cinderella awesome story is in our by the way we interviewed in person in Wales, a fantastic prince of a guy, nice host, humble dude. And I leave, I go to the Isle of Man, I come back here, and while I'm traveling, he gets a call from Ed Bullion hey, you want to come to the Gumball 3000 with me? And he's like, Hell yeah. And by the way, it's in the Bugatti Veyron. Holy shit, Bugatti Veyron. And he flies over and has this amazing experience. So what a full circle experience that must have been for Tommy. And uh, I must say I'm a little bit jealous, but I couldn't be happier for all these experiences to happen to such a prince of a dude.

SPEAKER_15 2:26:22

Yeah, absolutely. Both guys. And um, if things hadn't gone, it's just a spoiler alert. No, we well, you've interviewed him. Clearly, he's not in prison. But I was gonna say, if he had gone to prison, he would not have been able to accept that that offer.

SPEAKER_16 2:26:34

That's true.

SPEAKER_15 2:26:37

And um, an episode which will drop after that is Eggle on the road. She just returned from a trip to Peru. And before that, I had sent her a message just to catch up after the interview where we met her in the uh in the studio in Stockholm. And she said she responded the day a day later, and she's like, I'm sorry I couldn't get back to you yesterday. I was doing um machine gun training with my company 206 in the Lithuanian Armed Forces. So super interesting interview with her. Stay tuned.

SPEAKER_14 2:27:06

Yeah, that's a reasonable excuse for not getting back to you. And then she actually sent the picture as evidence, which was, you know, so badass. Well, I'm sitting here smashing pilsners in the morning. She's doing machine gun training for the liberation of Ukraine. So she's a she's an authentic badass. Yeah, absolutely.

Music Credits And Sign Off

SPEAKER_15 2:27:24

The music is Silver Ghost. You can stream it anywhere, or you can buy it on iTunes. And with that, sir, if there's nothing else from you, I say we roll the outro.

SPEAKER_04 2:30:49

Weeks down the line when the story ran cold, they stitched the name to a ghost going old. Fourteen months of statue, a gavelar room, they handed it back and I called after me.

SPEAKER_08 2:32:13

All hell the algorithm gods. A special thanks to our Patreon supporters. You're keeping this dig and chip afloat. Thanks for listening to the ADV Cannonball Podcast. Keep your right hand cranked and your feet on the pegs.