Most blowouts give warning first. Not all, but most, and the warning is a sound rather than a light. A tread coming away from its casing generally spends a few miles droning: a low rhythmic noise that rises and falls with road speed rather than engine speed, often with a vibration that arrives at one particular speed and fades again above it.
What is happening underneath the rubber is that the steel belts and the tread have begun to separate, usually from water that crept in through an old injury or a bruise from a pothole months earlier. A patch of tread the size of a hand lifts slightly and runs out of true, slapping the road once every revolution. At the front you feel it through the steering. At the rear you feel it through the seat, which is why rear separations get blamed on coarse tarmac.
If a car that was quiet last month has started to hum, do not book a wheel balance. Have somebody look at the tyres properly, inner shoulders included, because that noise has a limited amount of time attached to it.
Potholes cause more blowouts than speed does. We come to where you have stopped in SW6, fit and balance a replacement of the correct size on the spot, and check the wheel itself for damage while it is off. Tight in Walham Green, easy in Munster Village: neither stops the job. Level in Sands End, sloping in Hurlingham: we set the car straight first.
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The roads here rarely let a car get quick enough for a tread to leave the tyre, which is why the failure so often waits for the first proper journey out of the area. A tyre that has been droning quietly around Parsons Green all month is the one that lets go somewhere else. If a noise has appeared, we will come and look at it while the car is standing in its bay.
The driver was certain the drone was coarse surfacing, because it changed as they moved from road to road. It changed because road speed changed. The offside rear had a lifted patch of tread you could feel by hand once the wheel was off the ground.
Two attempts at balancing had done nothing, which is useful evidence in itself. A balance fault gives a smooth shake that builds and fades with speed. A separating tread gives a beat you can very nearly count. That tyre was scrap and had been for some time.
A car that had droned around Wandsworth Bridge Road all week failed on the first long fast run it made. That is the usual pattern. The tread stripped away and left the driver stopping with no spare in the boot.
Load the car sideways. A worn bearing changes its note when weight goes through it in a bend, louder one way and quieter the other. Noise from a failing tread follows road speed and is indifferent to steering.
No. The structure has come apart internally and there is nothing sound to bond a repair into. This is one of the few things where the answer is settled before we arrive, though we will still take the tyre off and show you.
It might be. Balance problems tend to be a smooth buzz across a narrow band of speed and they respond to being rebalanced. A separation is a heavier, slappy rhythm that you feel building. If a balance did not cure it, stop assuming balance.
We come to you, which sidesteps the question. If you are already out and wondering whether to press on, a separating tread fails at speed and under load, so a careful mile to somewhere safe is a very different thing from a long fast run.
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