Notorious - 122mph, two wheels, in the wet, son on board

[Martin Cassini]

Difficult to defend Robert Bennett for doing 122mph on a wet road with his 14-year old son riding pillion. The judge said the bike would have been a lethal missile if Bennett had lost control. Isn’t that the case at 70mph, OK, not as potentially damaging but lethal all the same? The judgement is based on a hypothetical. There was no loss of control, indeed it looked a competent piece of riding. In the BBC TV news item, the reporter described the bend he was approaching, emotively, as “sharp”. It looked sharp, because they were on the long end of the zoom, which foreshortened perspective, but I know the A361 and the only sharp bends are at roundabouts. So if there are no excuses, in my view there are mitigating factors, and a custodial sentence is excessive. (It would be interesting to hear what the son had to say, although with all the demonising, would he be able to give an unbiased account?)

[Mark Wadsworth]

I've tried adding the URL that ends in blogs/list to my 'bloglist to see if that alerts me to new posts.