Don't mess with Death Valley cops | Thank Frankel it's Friday

Because, yes, ashamed to admit it though I am, there has been more than one. The first must have been back in 2006 when Audi decided to launch the then all-new R8 in Vegas and instead of heading out on what looked like a particularly boring road route prescribed by Audi, John Simister and I high-tailed it out of town in the other direction, heading for Death Valley, otherwise known as both the hottest and lowest place on earth.

I was driving and, shall we say, exploring the full performance envelope of the car when we met a State Trooper coming the other way, who performed the best handbrake turn I’ve seen not under studio conditions and came after us, lights and sirens blazing and blaring. I was terrified and under no illusions as to what might happen if he’d actually clocked the speed at which we were travelling. But he hadn’t or, if he had, chose to ignore the fact. He was far more interested in this beautiful, all-aluminium mid-engined machine we were in. Were it not for the rings on its nose, he’d never have believed it was an Audi.

My second offence was completely innocuous by comparison. I was back in Death Valley, this time in a Bentley Continental GTC, in the middle of a drive from San Francisco to Vegas via places like Lake Tahoe, Mammoth Falls, Yosemite and, yes, Death Valley. It was one hell of a trip.

So there I was, minding my own business, going only slightly too fast, but through a set of roadworks that looked like they’d been there forever and certainly were not being worked upon. Next thing I knew, the rearview mirror had turned blue and there was an all too familiar sound in my ears. Turned out the truck behind belonged to a Park Ranger. Only then did I remember the briefing by Bentley the night before specifically pointing out that said Rangers took an unusually dim view of speeding in their park, and never more so than where there were road works. I felt a total twit, but was not overly concerned: I was going to get a ticket and thoroughly deserved it.

The Ranger walked over, said barely anything, but took my licence, and whatever paperwork I could find for the car and returned to her truck. Where she sat for a very long time. The next thing I knew, it seemed that half the police in California had turned up. Whereupon I was told I was in big trouble.

At first, they thought I’d nicked the car. But proving I had not did little to calm things down. According to them, and it is something Bentley never accepted, the car was on a particular kind of licence plate that allowed it to be driven only by a Bentley employee, and only within the state of Michigan. I qualified on neither count. Which meant the car was essentially unregistered for the state it was in, and I was uninsured. There was some other stuff I forget now.

What I do remember is that despite my apparent criminality and the alleged fact my car was uninsured and unregistered, some hours after I’d been apprehended, I was still allowed to continue my journey. I reached Vegas, told the good folk at Bentley all about it, who were kind enough not to call me what they must have been thinking for being so dumb as to draw attention to myself despite their recent and specific instructions to the contrary, and thought that was probably that.

I was wrong about that too. A couple of weeks later, rather ominous documents started falling like autumn leaves through my letterbox. I can’t remember how many things I was being accused of – though I do recall one was providing false information – but they required me to be in a court in Los Angeles to answer them. Inconvenient for someone living in Wales at the time. Bizarrely, even the photographer who’d been in the passenger seat was summonsed too.

So I called Bentley who said their legal department would look into it. That was then escalated to the Volkswagen legal team in the US, and from there to a specialist attorney. It seemed to be getting more serious by the week.

Which is when I got to see how law in America really works. Clearly, someone was going to have to pay for what had happened: Bentley remained adamant the authorities had just got it wrong, but the cost of fighting it would be absurd. So someone was going to have to fess up to something they had not done. Someone, or something.

What the US lawyer was able to do was change all the alleged offences from personal charges against me, to corporate charges against… well Bentley was adamant it wasn’t going on its corporate record as they’d done nothing wrong, so another company was found which was happy to cop it instead. The authorities just wanted their pound of flesh and appeared to give not so much as a single hoot as to where it came from.

The irony of it all was that through a process that took many months, the one thing of which I was incontrovertibly guilty – speeding – was never mentioned again. They had simply forgotten.