One man died and another was critically injured in a head-on car crash near Oxford yesterday (April 3).

Eyewitnesses talked of their horror at seeing the driver who was killed pull out to overtake four cars as a bend in the road approached.

His car, a red Vauxhall Cavalier, ploughed into a blue Renault Savannah coming the other way, just outside Islip on the road towards Charlton-on-Otmoor, north Oxfordshire.

Moments later, it was engulfed in flames. Police, paramedics and firefighters were called to the scene at just after 8.30am.

The Vauxhall driver was pronounced dead at the scene, but the second driver, a man eyewitnesses believed to be in his 50s, was critically injured and is now in a serious but stable condition in hospital.

Craig Maciejewski, 22, had been travelling along the road behind the driver who died.

He said: "I saw the whole thing. It was awful.

"When the driver first pulled out there was nothing coming the other way. But as he got to the bend there was a car coming the other way around the corner.

"It was a head-on smash. The cars just stopped dead. There were flames and smoke everywhere. The overtaking car was on fire."

Mr Maciejewski said there were a number of drivers on the road at the time.

He said: "I couldn't believe what I'd seen. It's shaken me up."

Mr Maciejewski, an accountant from Fringford who was on his way to work, said he thought there could have been a learner driver several cars ahead which was travelling more slowly than the rest of the traffic.

He said he was travelling at about 45-50mph when the accident happened.

Islip residents say the village is increasingly being used as a rat-run by commuters, especially since roadworks began on the nearby A34.

Jean Honour, of North Street, whose house looks out onto the scene of the accident, said: "At rush hour, the traffic builds up, especially in the mornings, and there do seem to be a lot of accidents on that stretch of road."

Mrs Honour said she did not see the crash happen but looked out of her front window at 8.40am to see smoke and flames billowing into the air.

"At first I just thought it was a car on fire," she said. "Then I realised it was far more serious than that."

Neighbour Eve House agreed the village's roads were getting busier.

She said: "The traffic is just continuous in the mornings and evenings with commuter traffic. People do use it as a rat run and it gets ever so busy."

The road from Islip towards Oddington and Charlton-on-Otmoor was closed for almost four hours while the emergency services worked to clear the scene. The victim has not yet been formally identified.

Accident figures from February 2001 to February this year show there have been two serious accidents on the same stretch of road and 14 less serious ones, but none were fatal.