Tyres age whether anybody drives on them or not. Ozone in ordinary air attacks the polymer chains in rubber at the surface, and sunlight speeds it up. Manufacturers know this, so they blend protective waxes into the compound which slowly migrate outward and form a barrier. The catch is what drives that migration: flexing. The tyre has to be worked for its own protection to keep arriving at the surface. A car that covers a few miles a week and then stands at a kerb is not working its tyres, so the barrier is not being renewed, and the rubber is left exposed to everything.
What you get is crazing. Fine cracks, first in the sidewall and at the bottom of the tread grooves, spreading slowly and looking like nothing much for years. They are not nothing. Each crack is a stress raiser, and as they deepen they eventually reach the casing underneath. At that point the tyre is holding pressure on damaged structure, and it fails the way damaged structure fails, which is suddenly and usually when it is warm and loaded. The unfair part is that this happens to tyres with plenty of tread left, on cars that have done almost no mileage, owned by people who have done nothing wrong.
A blowout on Belgrave Road does not leave you with many options, and the two obvious ones are both bad: sit and wait for a recovery truck, or limp somewhere on a shredded tyre and lose the wheel as well. The the Dolphin Square area phone and the Lupus Street phone ring the same fitter, any hour. Midnight in Belgrave Road, midday in Warwick Square, the same call either way. SW1V takes in St George's Square and Churchill Gardens, and we work the lot.
Burst tyre replacement in Pimlico is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout cover. For burst tyre replacement in Pimlico, call 07717 389637 or ask us for a quote.
Plenty of cars in Pimlico live in a resident bay and come out at weekends, and that is precisely the pattern this failure prefers. The kerbside sidewall takes the sun and the salt spray, the tyre never flexes enough to renew its own protection, and the tread stays deep while the rubber quietly turns brittle. Tread depth is a poor guide to condition on a car used that way. Look at the sidewalls and into the bottom of the grooves instead, particularly on the side facing the road.
A car used at weekends had tyres with years of tread remaining and sidewalls covered in fine cracking. The mileage said barely run in. The rubber said otherwise, and the rubber was right.
A tyre that looked perfect from above showed a network of splits along the base of the main grooves once the tread blocks were pressed apart. That is where the crazing usually shows first on a standing car.
The kerbside tyres on a car near Warwick Square were noticeably more crazed than the offside pair, having spent years facing the sun and the salt spray while the others sat in shadow.
Because tread depth measures wear and this is not wear. It is the rubber itself degrading with time and exposure. A tyre can be barely used and still be structurally past it, and on a car that covers very little distance that combination is the normal outcome rather than the unusual one.
A pattern of fine cracks, often in the sidewall and along the base of the tread grooves, a bit like old paint. Early on it is shallow and cosmetic. Once the cracks are deep enough to open when you press the rubber, the tyre has a limited future regardless of how much tread is on it.
No. The dressings sold for tyre sidewalls make rubber look darker and some of them actively strip the protective waxes out of it. Nothing puts back a polymer chain that ozone has broken. The only remedy is a new tyre.
It does, which surprises people. Regular flexing keeps the protective waxes migrating to the surface where they are needed. A car that gets a decent run every couple of weeks ages its tyres far more slowly than one that only moves on a Saturday.
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