I suspect that if any deep psychological analysis was ever undertaken of the whole phenomena that would probably be a hormonal reason for the current spate of road madness amongst our young men.

Whereas legend has it that once a year lemmings, allegedly throw themselves off cliffs in Norway in an uncontrolled frenzy of madness. So it would appear that their human counterparts, certainly those who are male seem hell-bent on repeating the exercise but this time using cars and brick walls.

As I mentioned before I don't want to appear as a killjoy and if my memory serves me correctly high committed a number of acts of potentially unwarranted gross stupidity when I first had a car, the difference being in those days that cars were a lot less powerful. Their walls only so much you could get out off a 1303 Beetle or a 1275 Mini.

Nowadays you have kids roaring around country lanes, highways and byways in machines that in terms of performance and technology would not have looked out of place in Monza, Silverstone and Monte Carlo on race day.

The difference is that the likes of Schumacher, Villeneuve, Hamilton and Alonso can not only drive cars around these places speed, they can also drive the cars round these places well enough to stay alive!

As they say, anyone can drive a car extremely fast it takes skill and maturity to be able to do it twice.

And that would appear to be where the problem lies. Today's testosterone fuelled and hormonally powered youth seems to be hell bent on pursuit of the ultimate thrill but is not prepared up to possibly pay his dues to make sure that he is physically or technically capable.

However, society it would appear to be fighting back, or so it seems. No longer is the ?need for speed? viewed as being mildly humorous and something that we all go through. Nowadays the public view is that speeding should be viewed as being as shameful as drink driving, because quite frankly speeding is fast catching up with drink driving as one of the biggest killers on the road. In fact, in certain parts of the United Kingdom speed is the biggest killer on our roads and that quite frankly it's a shameful situation.

It is shameful because it is extremely avoidable and deserves to be viewed as shameful as drink driving by the public.

Perhaps the answer is to yet again get insurance companies to load the insurance policies of those who are newly qualified to drive our roads. The trouble with this strategy is that it becomes socio-economically divisive in that it doesn't hit the well-off as badly as the rest of us. You would always find some idiot with more money than sense that would be prepared to bankroll ?the idiot son? through the first few years on the road!