fucking potholes

Last night I hit a pothole.

And when I say hit, I mean mother fucking hit (I should warn that this blog entry may be a little more sweary than usual as I'm a rather pissed off). It felt like I was mounting the curb. And since I was on the A31 doing the best part of 60 miles an hour it was not a fun experience. It was a massive jolt and a there was a huge bang as I guess the shocks slammed up to take the impact.

Unfortunately, however, when I got home I was not sensible.

When I got home I should have checked out the tyre. I can't really check out the suspension, but the tyre is easily checkable and I now appreciate I should have had a look.

The reason I should have had a look is because the tyre has punctured. I don't think it could have burst as I didn't detect anything odd on the rest of the drive home. However, the drive in this morning got increasingly worse as I went.

I realise now that this was the tyre deflating. It's currently sat in the office car park awaiting me putting the skinny space-saver tyre on.

And that'll be a fucking nightmare. I've never changed the tyres before and it's got one of those locking wheel nuts, which I bet will be a pig to do. That's assuming the garage hasn't done the usual trick of tightening the tyres to such a degree that even bloody Hercules couldn't get them off.

So now I have a catalogue of potential problems.

First off the obvious - I'll need a new tyre. My tyres are a special size that are both quite rare and fucking expensive. We're talking at least £100. That's a lot of money. This means that even getting it sorted now will mean it will be tomorrow before a new one arrives. That means I'll have to drive on the skinny tyre, which is not the safest thing to be doing.

Next up the alignment/tracking could have been put out, which is not a big fix, but obviously represents more money.

Then it gets horrible - the shocks could have been damaged, the springs could have been damaged, the wheel bearing could have been damaged or the damn steering rack could even have been damaged. Those are all fucking expensive.

This is all assuming I've not caused even more damage by running on a flat tyre like a stupid idiot. Which, knowing my luck, I'm sure I have.