Serious pothole on Tollcross Road, Glasgow

by Bleepo

31 Dec 2010

On Wednesday 29th December 2010 at around 2:45pm, I was taking my family into Glasgow via Tollcross Road.
As I was passing by a block of flats on my left hand side, I caught a brief glimpse of a pothole. Traffic was fairly busy in the opposite direction at the time, and in the short time I had to make an assessment, the hole looked bad enough to want to steer around it, but not bad enough to do serious damage (or so I thought at the time!).
As steering around it wasn't an option, unless I wanted to risk a collision, I applied the brakes to take it slowly, but it was too late - I wasn't yet at crawling pace by the time my front nearside wheel had gone into the crater with a resounding WHACK!
Water within the crater had disguised its true depth.

After that the steering didn't feel right at all and I pulled in when safe to do so further up the road to discover that my shiny new two week old tyre had instantly deflated.
I fitted the spare tyre and the steering still didn't feel quite right so I took the car back to my local garage, who had only just MOT'd the car at the beginning of the month. They popped it on the ramps and gave it a thorough inspection, and to my relief found no obvious damage.
Next they turned their attention to the alloy wheel. The tyre was removed and the wheel examined for signs of cracks or buckles. I was lucky - the wheel survived, but my brand new low profile tyre did not.
The mechanic pointed out damage to the sidewall where fibres had been torn just above the rim. He showed me that he could put his finger behind the tyre wall and flex the rubber outwards in the weakened area, whereas pushing against the sidewall in any other area produced no flexing at all as the surface was too hard to be able to push against.
I had to revisit my tyre specialist today, who fitted another tyre and confirmed that the damage to the tyre they sold me two weeks ago was caused by pothole damage. The business owner told me that he had seen quite a lot of damaged tyres in recent weeks for the very same reason.
He related a story of a customer who had to replace a tyre which was one day old because of pot hole damage!
The steering feels ok now that I have two identical tyres on the front once again but so far I'm down another 64 pounds for the tyre and have been advised to get my tracking checked, a job still to be done at the time of writing.