Around midnight on Easter Sunday, three friends of ours raced across the Mittlerer Ring in their cars. Where Tempo 50 is allowed, they accelerated to up to 120 things, according to the police. What sounds like an illegal car race wasn’t one for the police: the investigations had yielded no clues, according to a police spokesman.
Plainclothes police officers had observed how an Audi, a Hyundai and a Fiat raced over the Mittlerer Ring “at significantly excessive speed in a northerly direction”. The drivers braked at the permanently installed speed cameras and drove past them at the permitted maximum speed. Immediately after the stationary measuring devices, the three vehicles accelerated again.
At midnight only a few other cars were on the road. So the racers had free rein. According to the police, there was no danger to other road users. Police eventually stopped the three cars and checked the drivers. It is a 22-year-old and a 23-year-old man from Munich and a 21-year-old from the Fürstenfeldbruck district.
Police confirm: “They belong together.”
According to the police, all three – “they belong together,” said a spokesman – will be fined in a high three-digit amount. In addition, all three drivers receive an entry in Flensburg and a one-month driving ban. If it had been possible to prove that they had illegally raced a motor vehicle, the penalties would have been much more draconian: Section 315d of the Criminal Code provides for two years in prison or a fine in comparable cases.
In 2022, a total of 52 prohibited motor vehicle races were found in the area of the Munich police headquarters, not including the federal motorway routes. The number fell by eleven cases compared to the previous year. According to police statistics, the drivers were between 14 and 46 years old, the majority between 19 and 25 years old.
The illegal races were exclusively private races, which usually happened spontaneously. In about half of the cases, the officials reported so-called solo races. On February 23, five young people between the ages of 17 and 19 from the districts of Freising and Munich – unwittingly – wanted to fight a car race on Leopoldstrasse with a civilian patrol of the Munich traffic police.