A rally driver has told an inquiry how his car crashed into spectators during a race in Inverness, killing a 51-year-old woman.
Graeme Schoneville, 31, was speaking during an inquiry into the deaths of four motor sport fans at two separate rallies in Scotland.
Joy Robson died of multiple injuries sustained at the Snowman rally in Inverness in 2013. Iain Provan, 64, Elizabeth Allan, 63, and Len Stern, 71, were killed the following year when a car ploughed into them at the Jim Clark rally near Coldstream in the Scottish Borders.
In the first day of evidence at Edinburgh sheriff court, Schoneville, from Lanarkshire, told how the car he was driving spun out of control into spectators near a hairpin bend.
“We came to a corner and the road surface changed and the car began to slide, which was OK because we’ve experienced that plenty of times,” he said. “As I tried to correct the slide the car then swung in the other direction and impacted a rock.”
Schoneville said all he could remember of the moment of the crash was “a loud bang” from the back left of the Honda Civic he and his co-driver were in before the car somersaulted in the air. “I can remember it rolling just by seeing the sky, then dark, then the sky,” he said.
Robson, a nursery teacher from Portree, Skye, was killed when the car landed upright on its wheels on top of her. An eight-year-old boy was also treated in hospital for injuries.
Schoneville and his navigator were both wearing a helmets and safety belts and escaped unhurt.
“Immediately after the crash, the car landing, [we were] aware of a lot of people round about the car and we could obviously see a commotion and we knew that somebody was potentially under the car,” he said.
Schoneville began rallying in 2006, but told the court that despite doing “bits and bobs” since the crash it had never felt the same.
Giving evidence, Michael Hossack, 36, who had been standing next to Robson at the event, said that after a car came very close to them he and his wife had decided to move up the road to a safer spot. “I said to my wife that I didn’t like that area,” he said, explaining that car tyres were churning up the road and making the course “slidier and slidier”.
The inquiry, which is expected to last several weeks, will examine the circumstances surrounding the deaths and aims to “help to avoid such incidents happening in the future”. The decision to hold a joint fatal accident inquiry was announced in December, though Scotland’s Crown Office said there would be no criminal proceedings in relation to either event unless new evidence came to light.
Evidence will be heard about the accident at the Jim Clark rally in May 2014 in the coming weeks. Provan, his partner, Allan, and Stern were fatally injured when a car spun off the course. Six others were injured after two accidents within two hours on the course in the Duns and Kelso areas. The Jim Clark rally has been suspended until the completion of the inquiry.
