Wodonga police also charged 12 people for using their mobile phones while driving during the five-hour blitz at the High Street and Elgin Boulevard intersection.

Plain clothes officers were stationed on each approach and called in offences to uniformed crews stationed further away who made the arrests.

The hoon driver, 19, had his vehicle impounded for 48 hours for careless driving, improper use and undue noise and will have to pay the cost of the seizure.

“He’s basically gone too heavy on the right foot and caused the wheels to spin in front of all of our spotters,” traffic management unit Sgt Cameron Roberts said.

Sgt Roberts said the mobile phone offences were particularly worrying.

“Particularly with mobile phone behaviour, people are not getting the message,” he said.

“Some people had it on speaker phone and were holding it six inches in front of their face, which effectively changes nothing, it shouldn’t be in your hand.

“When I am driving around (out of uniform) I’m still finding this behaviour is very prevalent.”

Sgt Roberts said the risk of phone conversations was greater than most people assumed, and even hands-free calls carried a risk.

“The actual risk is having the conversation, not so much the fact it’s in your hand,” he said.

“Just because it’s not illegal doesn’t mean that hands-free calls are not distracting, because they certainly are.”

Police also detected one seatbelt offence, one unregistered vehicle, one person failing to display P-plates and also issued several other defect notices for unroadworthy tyres and windscreens.

“We did a similar operation mid-last year for an aggregate eight days and on a pro-rata basis the number of offences was slightly lower,” he said.

“Whether we picked a day (yesterday) when people weren’t up to much remains to be seen.

“But only when people start getting the point about their driver behaviour will we see a downturn in these operations.

“It’s quite a successful strategy to target a whole range of things and until we see much lower results we’ll continue to conduct them randomly and not necessarily just at that location.”