Jail for China’s ‘Fast and Furious’ road racers who wrecked luxury cars
Beijing court hands jail terms and fines totalling 18,000 yuan fines to duo who wrote off sports cars worth millions
Beijing’s notorious “Fast and Furious” duo of illegal road racers who wrecked a Lamborghini and a Ferrari worth millions of yuan in early April received jail sentences at a district court in the capital on Thursday morning.
The pair pleaded guilty to dangerous driving and told the court they had no plans to appeal.
“I made a mistake, had a bad influence on the society, and hurt my family and friends,” the official Weibo account of Chaoyang District court, which live blogged the trial, quoted the Lamborghini driver, a 21-year-old Tang Wentian, as saying.
The court heard the cars were travelling between 165km/h and 179km/h – three times the speed limit – when they span out of control in the Datun Road Tunnel near the Olympic Stadium.
The Lamborghini veered to the side, ran over a guardrail and hit the tunnel wall, tearing off chunks of panelling, while the Ferrari – driven by a 20 year old Yu Muchun from Changchun, Jilin province – was damaged on its side and rear, the China News Service reported in April.
The defence lawyer said the young drivers were fist-time offenders who called police right after the crash, adding that they had paid a total of 320,000 yuan (HK$405,000) in compensation to relevant parties.
A woman passenger, surnamed Xu, in the Lamborghini was treated in hospital for a fractured lumbar vertebra.
But the court dismissed their request for leniency, saying the offences required jail terms –five months for Tang and four months for Yu – and fines totalling 18,000 yuan as a deterrent against similar incidents.
The crash was not the first in the capital involving expensive imported sports cars, and speculation was rife whether the young drivers, both in their early 20s, were from families of senior government officials or rich businesspeople.
Tang’s family denied the rumours, saying their son bought his sports car after he made a fortune in the booming stock market this year.
Yu told mainland media that the Ferrari was borrowed.
