Focus: It was meant to be a ‘good laugh’. But now with two dead no

The 120,000 Porsche 911 Carrera, with a top speed of over 170mph, was cruising a few miles from the border between Macedonia and Albania. Behind the wheel was Cheshire-based property developer Nick Morley, 29, and next to him his entrepreneur friend Matthew McConville, 32.

The pair, who had left Athens that morning, were competing in a rally known as the Gumball 3000 and were running late. They had invitations to a gala dinner that evening, hosted by the prime minister of Albania in the presidential palace in Tirana.

They never made it. Around 6pm the Porsche slammed into a red Volkswagen Golf and both cars spun off the road and into a ditch. The VW driver, Vladimir Cepuljoski, 67, died near the scene and his wife Margarita died later in hospital.

The two Britons walked away badly shaken but unhurt.

How Wednesday s accident happened remains contested. Locals say the Porsche was speeding along the wrong side of the road and that the two Britons left the scene. Morley and McConville insist they were cruising at a legal 40mph and that the VW pulled out of a T-junction into their path. They deny leaving the scene.

Either way, police arrested both men, at the Albanian border, and charged Morley with heavy violation of traffic safety and failure to provide help to an injured person . McConville was released on bail, but yesterday Morley remained in custody.

As the police set about establishing the truth, one thing that everyone agrees on is that the Gumball 3000 was an accident waiting to happen. Every May, jet-setters, trustafarians, royals, Middle Eastern movers and sheikhers and eccentrics of every stripe fuel up with testosterone and God knows what else to race their Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris 3,000 miles across continents.

The rally is the go-faster creation of 34-year-old British former model and wannabe playboy Maximillion Cooper and is now being variously referred to as the Dumball and Scumball on the internet.

Competitors, supposedly vetted by Cooper, pay nearly 30,000 for the privilege of driving all day and partying all night. After each day behind the wheel there s a swanky dinner, including hot n cold running babes. The race has a reputation for rock n roll style excess. Every year there is mangled metal, arrests, fines and trashed hotel rooms. Yet every year the drivers come back for more. Living dangerously is they say a good laugh .

No one is laughing now. As relatives of the Cepuljoskis grieved, Cooper cancelled the rest of this year s race. A victory parade in central London, followed by a party with US hip-hop star Xzibit, Jamiroquai frontman Jay Kay and model Caprice, that was due to take place last night, was hastily cancelled.

The main sponsor, Adidas, which backed the race to the tune of 1m, pulled out on Friday and has cancelled all future sponsorship.

It s the end of road for this year and what many are now asking is: is the Gumball party, and indeed the wider petrol-head phenomenon it stands for, over for good? CRITICS say the deaths prove that the very idea of braying speed freaks careering across continents like outlaws is so outdated and dangerous that it should be consigned to the history books and the old movies that inspired it. The Gumball is a homage to films such as the 1976 Gumball Rally and the 1981 Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds.

The detractors are not just the usual battalion of health and safety nannies who object to a race in which competitors stick speeding tickets to their wind-screens as badges of honour.

Car manufacturers, usually happy to lend cars to celebrities taking part in races of almost any kind, refuse to loan cars to Gumballers. Silvia Pini, of Italian superbrand Maserati, says: It s just too risky. There are too many unknowns.

Style and social commentators say the toffs jolly is also out of step with the socially responsible spirit of the age. Crawford Hollingworth, executive chairman of consumer analysts Henley Centre Headlight-Vision, says: We live in an age where some things, such as buying a fancy car, have become a little too obvious and easy to decode. For the rich, giving back and making a difference to society is the new cool.

Look at Bono or Warren Buffett. We envy the person who takes a year s unpaid sabbatical to travel the world more than the one who buys a new Porsche.

Even professional petrol-heads argue the Gumball should be scrapped. Michael Harvey, editor of BBC Top Gear magazine, Britain s biggest-selling auto title, says: The Gumball is a bunch of overprivileged, beautiful young things showing off in front of anyone bored enough to watch or tragically, it turns out, get in their way. It s elitist and silly.

The Gumball is not the first road race to hit controversy of course: the Mille Miglia, which takes place next week from Brescia to Rome and back, was stopped in 1957 after a crash that killed two drivers and 11 spectators. But in less than a decade the Gumball has become the most notorious.

It began in 1999 when the well-connected Cooper invited his celebrity friends, including actors Jason Priestley and Billy Zane, and singer Dannii Minogue, to take part in a six-day trans-European road trip, a modern-day grand tour fuelled on parties.

The first race was incident-free. In the second, in which 85 cars left London and went to Spain, France, Italy and Germany, there were two accidents, a 6,000 fine for overtaking a police car, and a 10,000 bar bill. It was the third Gumball to Russia that got really crazy, with crashes, car-jack-ings and arrests.

By the time of the 2005 race from London to Morocco and back, the racers motto had become Death or Glory and bets on who would win had reached 1m. One German racer, Kim Schmitz, promised to give two of the hottest female drivers 500,000 each if they beat him. If he won, he got a threesome. He won.

The rally s supporters praise its no-limits ethos and camaraderie. Regular Richie Warren,a 41-year-old Briton who owns underground record label Fuel, spoke about it last year in a way that now seems eerily prophetic. You live on the edge, he told Vanity Fair. Yeah, someone might get killed. Some silly bastard . . . could go over on the wrong side of the road and total a f****** wife and children in their little car. It could happen .. . I couldn t give a flying f***.

Cooper claims he makes every effort to ensure participants stick to speed limits. But critics say his pleas fall on deaf ears. The wilder the Gumball has got, the faster it has grown.

Cooper was on his way to achieving his goal of making the race a mass-market brand. He recently launched dozens of spin-offs: Gumball clothing, records, TV and film. The race generates 10m a year and the spin-offs a larger figure. Advertising and marketing giant WPP valued the brand at 150m.

The cancellation of this year s race means Cooper will lose money. Will he lose his business altogether? Some would love to see the back of him and are already doing their best to run him off the road. GERMAN police effectively banned the rally this year. Drivers were pulled over as they entered the country from Holland and forced to drive slowly on the autobahn the one place where they could have legally driven at 200mph behind a police escort.

Turkey refused the race access altogether. The Gumballers were forced to divert to Athens.

Cooper says he is shocked by Wednesday s accident and insists he is doing everything he can to help the Cepuljoskis. He and his wife, Danish beauty Julie Brangstrup, flew to Skopje yesterday to pay their respects to the family.

Cooper told The Sunday Times last night: This is the first time anything like this has happened in nine years. That s strictly true, but somewhat misleading. In Morocco two years ago a Lamborghini rammed a small car and injured the woman driver.

Cooper insists he wants to continue with next year s race, which is due to begin in London and take in Moscow and North and South Korea before ending in Sydney.

We bring amazing entertainment and enjoyment to drivers and to the people in the cities to which we go, he said. Whatever it takes to make it 100% safe, we will do, including having police escorts.

Police escorts for would-be outlaws living a rock star life? Surely the millionaires and mad hatters who go Gumball would rather take the bus.

Mr Bee, a car is an inanimate object. The driver of the vehicle should be the focus of responsibility. If you limited a cars speed to 70mph a car could still reach that speed and kill someone in a 30mph zone. A car could kill someone at 30mph. This society is heading fast towards making adjustments to cope with the effects of the idiot people it's breeding, instead of trying to ensure they dont grow up to BECOME idiots. Why try to fix the effects of problems, when we can combat the problems before they have effects. There are too many problems with this article - the main one being about Kim Schmitz - find a picture of that guy and then try to make the story about him in this article compute - THEN re-read the article with a view to questioning everything it says bar the quotes.

Virginia, the Gumball has no element of competition I believe, other than prizes for the wackiest fancy dress etc. There is no race, no rally, no element of timing whatsoever. Not legally anyhow, there is no lawful way for the participants to compete with each other. Its when I read garbage like this article, that I am reminded of how we came to be at war in Iraq. When the so-called responsible newspapers publish fairy sories, we have to ask ourselves how is it possible for us to have an accurate opinion on anything?

You only have to look at the viewing figures for BBC's top gear worldwide to understand Supercars are of our age and there are more people who aspire to drive, own and see them then there are who want to ban them. The reality is that the chartiy giving few he speaks of probably had no interest in supercars in the first pace, but there are as many supercar nuts in the world who do not give a fig one way or the other what people think of their passion. The market for supercars has never been bigger, the proliferation of road rallies such as gumball shows a genuine desire amongst a majority to own and use these cars, i do not think the demise or continuation of the gumball will influence the thousands of meets of owners clubs and enthusiasts taking place the world over.

It seems this older couple decided to use a small ill-equiped car and was shoved over the road which in turn rolled their Golf car that had no roll bars....giving them deadly massive injuries. Even if the Golf erroneously pulled out into oncoming traffic going at a regulated speed they could still be hit with force enough to be pushed off the road...ending with the same results. Was the couple experienced in driving around these muscle cars? Why was such a small dangerous car allowed to enter the rally? It just seems that the participants and their cars need to be screened better for safety to show the best efforts at running this rally.

Its ridiculous to compare the Gumball - an unofficial, unsanctioned Rally run by amateurs (in every sense of the word) with highly questionable motives and driving skills (to be polite about them) with the Mille Miglia. Suggesting that there is any similarity between the two is just a piece of journalistic nonsense. Don't tar all car enthiasts with the same brush just because there are some idiots out there. Hopefully this will be the end of the Gumball and all similar events.

Mr Aldridge I think you misunderstand. 1957 was the last ever Mille Miglia. The 11 spectators, driver and co-driver who were killed in 1957 knew motor racing was dangerous so took a risk. What risk did that couple know they were taking? How can you compare a race on mostly closed public roads 50 years ago, sanctioned by the official body of motor sport in which racing drivers of the caliber of Fangio and Moss competed, with a 'tour' where ordinary members of the public are told not to exceed the speed limit? The Gumball is not a race. The Mille Miglia was. Now its a tour where respectable middle aged men drive at respectable speeds showing off their very expensive classic cars. Some of which raced in the Mille Miglia. The Gumball is an excuse for rich people to show who has the biggest penis or largest breasts.

Why not shift the event offroad to a part of the world where warlords, bandits and other characters of unrestrained individualism add additional hazard? Partying after escaping pursuit by a few technicals bristling with trigger-happy militia in the desert would have greater meaning than celebrating a few speed tickets. Sponsorship might still be available for limited funds, though the institutions might not want their logos displayed.

My brother-in-law was killed pulling out of a sideroad when an Audi TT was doing 80 on a 30 mph town road. Why can you buy a car in the UK that does more than 70mph if that is the fastest you are llegally allowed to drive? Why are fast car cars not treated like guns? You can have your Ferrari or whatever, but it stays at the car club where you use it to confirm Freud was right and then you lock it up again and go home in your speed-limited Smart car, say. Is there a problem with that?

I think it is absurdly selfish for these idiots to turn the highways and streets into race tracks. But, if they continue and are allowed access to a country's or region's roads for this race, how about checking the time of the drivers at the end of each day's lap, and disqualifying those whose time demonstrates that they had to exceed speed limits for some part of the day's drive? It would be easy enough to do a computer -generated time+speed maximum for each day.

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Focus: It was meant to be a ‘good laugh’. But now with two dead no : from www.timesonline.co.uk