"A DEADLY combination" of speed, inexperience and peer pressure led to the fatal car smash which killed three Barry teenagers last year, an inquest has concluded.

Seventeen-year-olds Rhodri Miller, Corey Price and Alesha O'Connor were killed in the accident on the A470 near Brecon in March last year when the Volkswagen Golf driven by Mr Miller - who had only passed his test 48 hours previously - swerved into a head-on collision with another vehicle.

The passenger in that vehicle, 68-year-old Margaret Challis, was also killed in the crash.

He was driving at night, on what was described by police officers as a "challenging road" with passengers in his car. Police Inspector Gary Jones told the court that in his opinion Mr Miller would also have been under pressure to keep up with the other cars in the convey.

Aberdare Coroner's court heard today (Tuesday, April 12) how Mr Miller had been travelling in a convoy of seven vehicles from the Barry area when he lost control of his car on a tight bend on the mountain road near the Storey Arms at around 10.15pm.

Witness statements and police forensic evidence shows that Mr Miller took the bend too narrowly and ended up on the wrong side of the road, quickly tried to right himself and ended up mounting a grass area which sent his car back into the road at an angle where he began to fishtail wildly, travelling across the road and head on into the car of Mr Emlyn Williams who suffered a fractured spine and fractured ribs in the crash.

His passenger Mrs Challis, a great grandmother who was recovering from a brain tumour, was killed.

Mr Miller's other passengers Rhys Hunter and Daniel Bennett survived the crash.

Police crash scene expert David Stacey told the court that it was the worst vehicle crash site he had attended in his 20 years in the job.

Dyfed Powys Police Inspector Gary Jones told the court in his evidence that although there was no indication that Mr Miller had been speeding at the time of the crash, the police had received a call from a member of the public concerned with the driving of those in the convoy after spotted them at Nantgarw.

Insp Jones told the court that CCTV also showed the cars in the convey swapping places as they travelled towards Brecon.

A photograph taken in Mr Miller's car eight minutes before the crash showed his speedometer as being at around 75mph and text messages recovered from the phone of one of the passengers in another car made references to the convoy being "madness" with "everyone racing".

Coroner Andrew Barkley told the court that whatever speed Mr Miller was driving at when he took the bend, it would have been too fast for someone with so little experience of driving.

"What is clear is that this was down to driver error," he said. "It was a fatal combination of inexperience, speed for the conditions of the road and of course, as Inspector Jones says, peer pressure.

"Those factors all come together in a deadly combination with fatal consequences."