‘Innocent until proven guilty’ are words I see becoming ever more important with each passing day, as trial by social media becomes more prevalent. With that said, if something smells fishy but nothing is happening, you should have a sniff. And something stinks about the outrageously dangerous motorcycle riding shown on Speeddemon407, and its relationship to 25-year-old Dallas Ashley.
Ashley happens to be the great-grandson of NASCAR Founder Bill France Sr., and grandson of billionaire Jim France, the CEO, chairman, and executive vice president of NASCAR, which might be worth noting.
The situation is a bit convoluted, but it all revolves around the YouTube channel ‘Speed Demon’. The channel previously showed videos of extremely reckless riding, sometimes showing the rider exceeding speeds of 150 mph on the highway and weaving between cars while going similarly high speeds on Interstate 4, Florida’s Turnpike, the 417 expressway, Semoran Boulevard, and other local thoroughfares.
In one video, we can hear the rider say, “Be careful, you almost died! I almost killed you!”, amongst other things that indicate the rider knows their riding is beyond dangerous—we must call them “the rider”, or some other non-specific name, as we can’t identify who was behind the camera. However, in other videos on the channel, you can see Ashley and he’s giving riding tips and advice.
In fact, Ashley currently features in every video on the channel—”currently” is the important word here.
More than 120 videos were either removed or set to private on the Speeddemon407 channel, leaving six videos and three shorts at the time of riding—all containing Ashley.
None of the POV speeding videos are still on the channel, at least not publicly, and they were all taken down after reporters started contacting Ashley. But that’s still not illegal, as it doesn’t prove he was riding the bike shown in the removed videos, but coincidentally, there is a link between the videos that are still public and the ones that were taken down.
The bike shown in the POV speeding videos was almost certainly a ZX-6R, judging by the dashboard and speed shown in relation to the gear and RPM, and Ashley rides a ZX-6R in many of the videos that are still publicly available. Now, again, this could just be a massive coincidence, but at the very least, it’s enough to investigate. The GPS units in action cameras and phones have been used in many other cases to prove who was riding at what time, and more importantly, where and how fast they were going.
At the time of writing, no criminal charges or traffic citations have been filed in connection with a YouTube channel, which I find to be suspect. I’m sure this is probably a big, huge, giant, coincidence.
