The Red Arrows, eh? Aren’t they brilliant? And what a way for a fast jet pilot to vector themselves into semi-retirement after a distinguished service career hooning about in Typhoons.

What would the automotive equivalent be? Caterham drift school instruction for an ex-rally pro? It’s not quite the same prospect, somehow. So why don’t we create one? Why couldn’t there be an automotive display team staffed by ex-magazine road testers and ‘gentleman drivers’, specialising in formation driving?

‘Skidmark Synchro’ could perform exclusively in slightly low-rent locations: disused airfields, C-list race circuits that most of us have forgotten still exist and those extra-quiet stretches of dual-carriageway public roads that don’t really go anywhere.

There wouldn’t be many places to stand and watch from, but that wouldn’t matter because we would be entirely rubbish, so nobody would come in the first place.

The best place to ‘enjoy us’ would be via an internet live stream shot out of the boot of a Skoda Superb Estate tracking car that’s half full of empty coffee cups and bottles of Windolene.

Skidmark Synchro would, for the most part, be wholly unworthy of its name. Most of our display manoeuvres would be undertaken at 25mph, with cars in oddly close formation, going around corners that you could probably take at triple the speed.

The announcer might say “and now the team presents… Arrowhead!”, and we would shuffle around superfluously behind the camera car.

“The Daredevil Parallelogram!” would, from a few hundred yards away, look 99% identical, except that, for those watching online, the slow-moving electric crossover vehicle nearest the camera would be different, its driver positioned just so in order to hide their ashamed face behind the car’s girthy A-pillar.

On occasion, we would have proper rear-wheel-drive performance cars and do skids. We would have to. Except, when observed live, these skids couldn’t be carefully edited to make the road testers seem at least halfway competent. They would be overwhelmingly half-arsed, ham-fisted, live skids.

Typically, we would have between six and 13 attempts at two- or three-car drift shots behind a camera car, most of which wouldn’t result in any synchronised oversteer whatsoever. Badly timed and positioned sliding, narrow avoidance of collision and general bad temper, embarrassment and blaming of the workman’s tools from those responsible would be their primary content.

Every synchronised skidding display would also have to end with at least one of the car’s rear tyres delaminating, after which it couldn’t take part in any subsequent part of the show.

The members of Skidmark Synchro would each have honorary responsibilities. Skidmark 1 would have the most celebrated reputation as a ‘helmsman’ driver. They would turn up at every display an hour late, never having fuelled their car, be the first to leave and insist on taking the most powerful car with them, whether it’s still needed or not.

The full team would number some 10 in total, but Skidmark 1 would only be willing to talk to Skidmark 2 (the next most senior) and Skidmark 8 (always 20 minutes early, brings cleaning gear and flasks of tea and spends most of the display worrying about what everyone is having for lunch).

Skidmark 4 is the ambitious renegade most likely to agree to a misguided jump shot. Skidmark 6 is universally liked, wears ostentatious trainers and can drift one-handed while simultaneously tapping out a WhatsApp funny. Skidmark 7 is a taciturn vegan of mercurial talent, whom it is impossible to feed from the average garage ‘food to go’ chiller.

And Skidmark 10 is the ‘work experience’ reserve driver, who turns up at every display in his 25-year-old Mazda MX-5, spends displays cleaning, fuelling and shuttling cars around and getting rained on, and yet inexplicably manages to remain chipper and film it all for his or her DriveTribe account. 

Skidmark 1 last cleaned a car in 1993. I haven’t worked out yet how much I will charge for tickets, but I am taking applications for positions in the squadron. If you’re interested, you know what to do.