A DRIVER who bolted from the scene of an accident has come "within a hairs breadth" of going to prison for lying about who was behind the wheel of his car.

Business owner Mark Chipchase had a bottle of gin in the front console and shotgun cartridges in the back when police finally traced the Nissan Navara 4x4 - thanks to a taxi driver.

The cabbie-turned-detective came across a Volkswagen Beetle driver and her daughter at the side of the road after they had been hit by Chipchase.

She followed tyre marks and then scratch marks which had been left on the road when a tyre had degraded, and found the badly damaged silver vehicle – registration M4000MC – parked up.

When police were alerted and went to the house, they received no answer so posted out forms for the owner to complete about the accident.

Chipchase said the Nissan had not been used at the time, and later told an officer it had been in for a service and not involved in a collision.

Later, he confessed to being the driver and claimed he had left the scene near Easby Hall in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, because he was late to pick up his children from school.

Chipchase – a member of the Thimbleby Shooting Ground – insisted he had not been drinking, and said the bottle had been in his car from an earlier shoot where it is tradition to have gin.

Robert Mochrie, mitigating, said the the father-of-three's plant hire business would collapse if he was sent to prison, and the impact on his family would be "horrendous".

Chipchase, of Roseberry Crescent, Great Ayton, admitted perverting the course of justice, driving without due care and attention, failing to stop and failing to report an accident and giving false information.

Judge Sean Morris told him: "What I have designed for you is a bespoke sentence. Once you realise what it involves, you will not like it, but you have escaped prison by the skin of your teeth. You have come within a hairs breadth of going down the stairs , and if I see you again, I will nail you to that wall."

Chipchase was given a ten-month prison suspended sentence, a six-month night-time curfew, banned from driving for a year with 300 hours' unpaid work, £1,200 costs and £500 compensation to the Beetle driver whose car was written off in the smash.