Top 10 - Worst excuses for speeding

You have our every sympathy, dear reader - searching for good young driver car insurance can be a thankless task. No doubt you're feeling bored and frustrated, and probably wishing you were surfing somewhere else altogether than another motor insurance website.

Well, at Hoot we understand how you're feeling. That's why we've come up with Hoot Top 10's - to give you a break from all the bother and the chance to actually laugh a little.

So kick back and forget all about those phony cheap car insurance deals for ten minutes, as we bring you:

Hoot Car Insurance Services Top 10: Worst Excuses for Speeding
First, though, we have to pay tribute to Ray King.

Ray King is one of the many fine men and women who work for the Northumbria Safety Camera Partnership.

Ray and his team take many phone calls from irate motorists who have been caught speeding. They also open lots of letters from people who feel that various circumstances justify their breaking of speed limits.

"Some drivers seem to think that if they tell a good enough story then they will get off," said Ray, although that strategy rarely, if ever, succeeds.

Nevertheless, some of the stories he was reading were so bizarre, so colourful, so downright wacko that Ray couldn't bring himself to just file them away.

No, he had to share these fascinating speeding excuses - and share them with the world!

That's why he put together a list of "The top ten most elaborate excuses given by drivers caught on camera in Northumbria over the past year".

We present them here for your browsing delight, but under a different (some would say inaccurate, but we say snappier) name:

"The Hoot Top 10 Worst Excuses for Speeding"
10. "The only way I could demonstrate my faulty clutch was to accelerate madly."

9. "There was a suspected case of foot and mouth and I had to rush to see the cow concerned."

8. "A violent sneeze caused a chain reaction where my foot pushed down harder on the accelerator."

7. "I had to rush my dying hamster to the vets."

6. "The vibrations from the surfboard I had on the roof rack set off the camera."

5. "My friend had just chopped his fingers off and I was rushing the fingers to hospital."

4. "There was a strong wind behind my car which pushed me over the limit."

3. "I had a severe bout of diarrhea and had to speed to a public toilet."

2. "I was in the airport's flight path and I believe the camera was triggered by a jet overhead, not my car."

1. "I had passed out after seeing flashing lights, which I believed to be UFOs in the distance. The flash of the camera brought me round from my trance."

Oh, sweet tears of joyful mirth! Ray, you were right to share these letters with us.

More from Ray
"This is a light-hearted look at excuses for speeding, but it is a serious issue - we'd rather not be getting any letters at all because no one is breaking the speed limit and no one is receiving a ticket."

"That is the ultimate aim of the [Northumbria Safety Camera] Partnership, which of course would put me out of a job."

That's right - Ray is so committed to road safety that he would gladly give up his job if it meant an end to speeding on Northumbria's roads. That's an opinion shared, we are sure, by the rest of his correspondence team.

We already know these people have speeding tickets to their names, and pretty wild imaginations to boot. And according to Ray King, these top 10 excuses are just the tip of the iceberg - he gets mailbags full of nonsense letters from drivers every week.