About

George (GCM)

I started my working life as a Personal Trainer & Nutritionist and naturally relied on my car to visit clients. Unfortunately, I found myself on the side of the road broken down with absolutely no knowledge of how to resolve the situation.

Like most people I didn’t have the budget to send my car to a main dealer so I started to use Google and Youtube to self-diagnose any issues with my car. It was then I noticed that the videos that I was watching weren’t answering my questions so decided to start making my own.

A few different project cars and lots of videos later I was approached in lockdown by MPS Owen Messenger who is a police officer for Devon and Cornwall Police. He voiced to me that they were struggling with a vulnerable user group consisting of young, inexperienced, and overconfident drivers and was curious to see if I wanted to help out with some unique road safety content.

2 Years later, 1.4 Billion views and over a million combined followers across all platforms we are now regularly working with Devon and Cornwall Police, Vision Zero Southwest, PAAA, Devon and Somerset Fire Service, MJ Performance and many more.

Our goal is to educate all drivers about road safety and to help stop all fatal & serious collisions on our roads.

Owen Messenger

Owen messenger

My name is Owen Messenger and I’m a Sergeant in Devon and Cornwall Police, Roads Policing. My job role specifically is Road Casualty Reduction.

I joined D&C Police in 2003 and was promoted to Sergeant in 2008. Since then I’ve worked in a number of roles including response, custody and roads policing.

I grew up in North London and was heavily involved in owning and modifying cars. I’ve had many cars including; Sierra Sapphire RS Cosworth, Series 1 Escort RS Turbo, Fiesta RS Turbo (x2), Citroen AX GT, Renault 5 GT Turbo, Astra GTE 16v, Mk2 Golf GTi 16v, Subaru Impreza, Peugeot 206 GTi 16v, Skoda Octavia, vRS (mk1 and mk3.5 245), JCW F56, Skoda Superb 280 4×4, Mk2 Focus RS (CP400) and many more.

We attended Southend and Chelsea Cruise, as it was back then in the 90s, and raced the 1/4 mile strip at Santa Pod. This was the true ‘max power’ era!

Even back then though I saw it when things went wrong but when you’re young you never think it will happen to you. However it happened to friends of mine and people died or went to prison. Many lives ruined.

These days the passion for cars still remains but my job role sees the results of when things do go wrong all too often. There is never an ‘accident’, there is a collision. Collisions are caused because somebody has done something wrong. Too many times last year people never made it home to their families because somebody did something wrong, either by design or by mistake. On average 4.3 people are killed on the UK roads every day. Thats over four times a day Police are telling a family that their loved ones aren’t coming home. That’s four times too many. And that doesn’t include serious or life changing injury. 28,000 people last year were killed or seriously injured on our roads and it’s all preventable.

If the figures above were violent crime then you’d expect the police to do something about it and it would be all over the mainstream media. These numbers are far greater than violent crime but sadly it doesn’t make the news as it’s just accepted as an ‘accident’.

Casualty reduction is only one part of roads policing. For example, criminals also use the road networks so a big part of what we do is denying them the use of the roads. Hopefully other pages on this site will show what we do and why as we go along.

So my passion for cars is balanced with my passion for roads safety. My role in this project is to try to explain the existing rules to you in a way you’ll understand and that’s engaging, informative and entertaining. Traffic law is probably the most complex area of policing with complicated legislation written many years ago. The two main areas we will look at are the The Road Traffic Act 1988 and Construction and Use Regulations 1986. It’s hard sometimes to explain but we will do our best.

This is not about making money and we don’t make the rules, they’re already there. If it were about making money then telling you how to do it right and not get a ticket would be counterintuitive.

We want you to enjoy your hobby but above all to stay safe on the roads.

Owen