IT’S not often police ask a driver to drink several cans of lager before getting behind the wheel, but that is exactly what happened this week.

Thames Valley Police asked double Le Mans-winning racing driver Darren Turner to test how well he could drive under the influence as part of its Christmas drink-drive campaign.

Using a hi-tech driving simulator, the Aston Martin driver completed three five-lap races of the famously challenging Monaco Formula 1 circuit.

He did the first race completely sober, the second after two cans of lager and the third after four cans.

Mr Turner, 36, from Banbury, who has driven the simulated circuit thousands of times, completed the first attempt flawlessly at Banbury’s Base Peformance Simulators, which trains racing drivers.

He then drank two cans of five per cent Stella Artois – a total of 4.4 units of alcohol – and was involved in one big crash and three smaller shunts.

After another two cans, he crashed five times, spun the car several times and scraped the barrier for the final race.

He said: “I really thought it would only be a small drop-off in performance, but it was dramatic – there were major mistakes.

“The scariest thing was I couldn’t even put a lap together.

“Whenever I made a mistake it took so long to get back into the driving rhythm.

“I wasn’t even getting into the corner the right way.

“The whole approach was out of sync.”

He also said distractions in the room, such as people watching, affected his driving a lot more than when he was sober, when he could block them out.

Looking at data from the races, he found he took corners 30 metres later than when he was sober.

Insp Colin Clark said: “In this environment Darren has been able to step out of the machine and the system can be reset.

“But in the collisions we have gone to throughout 2010, people haven’t been able to reset the machine.

“They have resulted in major damage to cars, injuries and death.

“The message, as it always is, is don’t drink and drive.

“If you do, we will be out there, we will breathalyse you and we will take you through the court system.”

In the first 12 days of this month, police arrested 30 people in Oxfordshire for drink-driving, a 25 per cent increase on last year’s 24.