A TEENAGER who led police on a 90mph chase onto the Bradford ring road has been locked up and banned from driving for 18 months.

Saif Sageer, 19, raced his VW Golf GTE up Bowling Back Lane in a manoeuvre labelled “the worst piece of driving” the officer involved in the pursuit had ever seen.

The Recorder of Bradford, Judge Roger Thomas QC, said Sageer’s was “just the sort of case” that had prompted the Telegraph & Argus’ ‘Stop the Danger Drivers’ campaign and Operation Steerside by West Yorkshire Police, both aimed at eradicating the dangerous driving that blights the district’s roads.

Sageer, of Dale Croft Rise, Allerton, had pleaded not guilty to a charge of dangerous driving but was found guilty by a jury at Bradford Crown Court.

The court heard that on the afternoon of March 25 this year, Sageer was “racing bumper to bumper” with another Golf on the 30mph Bowling Back Lane when the vehicles were seen by police, prompting a pursuit.

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The officer said he was forced to travel at around 90mph to catch Sageer, who failed to stop until he was forced to slam the brakes on as he entered the ring road on Sticker Lane.

He then abandoned the car on a side street before jumping over a fence and fleeing the scene on foot.

Describing the chase, the roads policing officer said Sageer’s driving was “despicable” and “a disgrace”, saying it was the worst he had seen in eight years in the role, and the sort of driving “that is going to kill somebody.”

In mitigation, Nick Leadbeater said Sageer, who works as a broker in a car hire business and had a clean licence, was driving the vehicle legitimately and with the correct insurance having borrowed it from his uncle.

He added that while he acknowledged people were “fed up” of certain defendants in Bradford “ignoring the road traffic laws”, there had been no statistical evidence that the standard of driving was any worse than other cities in the UK.

When Mr Leadbeater cited the ‘Stop the Danger Drivers’ campaign, Judge Thomas said a young man like Sageer “racing through the streets” was the kind of case that caused “considerable concern.”

“This isn’t just the local press stirring up a campaign for the sake of it, it has now reached the council chamber and the palace of Westminster,” he said.

“It is staggering that people still don’t understand what will happen if they drive dangerously, they will go to custody.”

Sageer was sentenced to nine months in a young offender’s institution and must take an extended re-test before he can drive again.

Sergeant Cameron Buchan, of the West Yorkshire Police Safer Roads and Neighbourhood Support team, said: “This man has been rightly held to account for his actions and been found guilty by his peers of the worst type of bad driving.

“Operation Steerside was created to target people who put the lives of innocent road users at risk and we will continue to do so.”

The latest weekly figures for Operation Steerside showed that 112 drivers had been caught committing a variety of offences, bringing the total number of motorists snared to 5,573.

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