A driver who was killed with a woman from another car as he was followed by police was four times the drink- drive limit, an inquest was told yesterday.

Oil worker Kevin Russell, 46, had been treated for alcoholism for five years, said his doctor.

Autopsy tests showed he had drunk nine pints of beer or 14 shots of spirits when a Cleveland Police van began following him at midnight, yards from his home in Saltburn. He accelerated away.

Police driver PC Ronald Fletcher saw him overtake on a blind bend on the A174 single carriageway.

His Vauxhall Astra flew 15 feet into the air as it crashed head-on into a Ford Mondeo.

Myra Tinkler, 62, and her husband Harry, 63, were being driven home from his firm's Christmas party. She and Mr Russell were dead on arrival at hospital.

Verdicts of accident from multiple injuries, on December 11 last year, were recorded in Middlesbrough on Mr Russell of Albion Terrace, Saltburn, and Mrs Tinkler of Cliff Road, Staithes, near Whitby