Court suspends young racing driver’s licence after road drift

Austria’s Landesverwaltungsgericht has upheld a six-month driving ban against a young probationary licence holder who drifted into an intersection in front of a police patrol and forced it to brake, ORF reported.

The incident began when the man turned around while driving home from a birthday party because one of his three passengers had left his wallet behind. He ignored a yield sign while using a side road to return in the opposite direction, forcing a police car approaching the intersection to slow down.

As he turned onto a main road, the rear of his car broke loose. The drift had already begun on the side road and continued through the entire turn, according to the recently published court decision. The driver then accelerated to 105 kilometres per hour in an 80-kilometre-per-hour zone.

The police patrol followed and stopped him. The district authority said he had forced the officers to brake suddenly to avoid a collision. The driver denied drifting, but both the authority and the court accepted the officers’ account that he had entered the intersection while drifting.

His lawyer argued that the man was a professional racing driver who had undergone intensive training and knew how to control his car. The lawyer said this made it unlikely that he would drift on public roads and that the man depended on his driving licence for his livelihood.

The court rejected the argument, saying police officers were capable of recognising a drifting vehicle. It described the driver’s conduct as particularly reckless because he had drifted into the intersection without paying attention to cross traffic.

The fact that the police car had also been travelling too fast did not change the outcome. The patrol had been driving at about 100 kilometres per hour in a 60-kilometre-per-hour zone without its emergency lights on, but it still had right of way.

The court overturned the authority’s refusal to hear witnesses and questioned them itself, but otherwise upheld the administrative penalty. The driver must surrender his licence for six months, complete a retraining course and serve an additional year of probation.