A PROLIFIC danger driver whose life was labelled a “festival of offending” has been jailed for four years.

Adam Virr, 31, was sentenced at Bradford Crown Court for his role in a police chase in which he tried to ram officers and claimed he had a gun.

Prosecutor Frances Pencheon said that on December 28 last year, police saw Virr in the Low Moor area of Bradford behind the wheel of Transit van they suspected was fitted with false plates. After they indicated for him to stop, he sped off, later hitting a barrier in a car park and narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with a patrol car during the ten-minute chase.

After mounting the pavement in Westcliffe Rise, Cleckheaton, Virr was boxed in by officers and responded by trying to reverse into their vehicles. After being unable to break free, he ran from the van, kicking out and injuring an officer in the process.

When police shouted at him to stop, he replied by saying: “I’ve got a gun. Stay back.”

The Transit van, along with an Audi, had been taken in a burglary on December 24, and when he was searched, Virr was found to have the keys to the stolen Audi in his jacket, with the car later recovered near his house on Brooklyn Road, Cleckheaton.

Virr pleaded guilty to charges of dangerous driving, driving while disqualified, and three counts of handling stolen goods, one of which related to an offence in June 2016 involving a £32,000 Volvo stolen in a burglary in the Burnley area.

The court heard that the defendant was on licence at the time of the offences, having been jailed in June last year, at a time when he was the subject of four suspended sentence orders, for driving while banned and attempting to pervert the course of justice, with the court told he had a “compulsive desire to get behind the wheel of a car”.

Miss Pencheon also said that Virr had four previous convictions for dangerous driving and nine for driving while disqualified, with a five-year ban imposed in March last year.

Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC told Virr: “There has been a festival of offending throughout your life.”

Imposing another five-year ban, he described the police chase as a “fairly hair-raising pursuit”, adding: “You used the van to try and ram your way out. An officer was injured, quite nastily, as he was trying to detain you.

“Under no circumstances can I give you yet another suspended sentence. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”