AN ORGANISATION called Swindon Young Drivers got together with the council to do something truly valuable the other day.

Setting up an obstacle course in the New College car park, they invited young people aged 14 and over to get behind the wheel.

The idea was to instil some of the good habits they’ll need if they’re to become safe drivers once they’re old enough to be allowed out on the roads.

I wish something like this had been around when I was a car-mad teenager, because then my first driving lesson at 17 might have consisted of something a bit more advanced than frying the clutch of a Triumph Acclaim while the instructor assumed the foetal position in the passenger footwell.

Unfortunately, the only way of getting underage driving experience around my way when I was a kid involved being enough of a delinquent to be put on probation.

Then you might be put on a youth engagement programme and given the chance to try stock car racing.

I considered becoming a delinquent in the hope of securing a spot of stock car racing experience, but soon gave up on the idea.

You had to be a hard kid to be a delinquent, harder even than the hard kids who used to work on the back of the lemonade lorry when it made home deliveries, and I’d never have cut the mustard.

But I digress.

More power to Swindon Young Drivers, and I hope every youngster with an interest in driving gets a chance to learn.

I’d also like to see a supplementary course covering some other aspects of motoring that most of us wish we’d known as young drivers, and especially if we were young male drivers.

There’s the question of one’s first car, for example. Unless the young male driver is a rich kid or in well-paid employment, the chances are that their first car will be a cheap to insure hand-me-down from Mum or Dad – a Nissan Micra, perhaps, or a VW Polo.

It is important for the young male driver to realise that everybody knows such cars are powered by modest four-cylinder engines.

Therefore making it nine times noisier by drilling holes in the tailpipe, or buying and installing a large diameter custom pipe, will not make the public think a Ford Mustang motor has somehow been shoehorned beneath the bonnet.

And nor will putting a big spoiler like the nether regions of a whale on the back.

Or putting in knock-off LED headlights whose beams bore into the brain pans of oncoming other drivers.

Or putting on a pair of aviator shades, sitting so low in the driver’s seat that people think there isn’t one and cruising about with your elbow in the breeze.

Other important things for the young driver to know include the inadvisability of never touching one’s indicator stalks, or doing 40 miles per hour down the middle lane of the M4, but this knowledge is far more complex.

So complex that many people in their forties and fifties fail to grasp it.