by David Finlay (15 Mar 05)

I can't speak for other motoring writers on this one, but to me there is nothing more embarrassing than to have to admit to a manufacturer that you have caused damage to a test car. The usual reaction is that "these things happen", and of course they are bound to if you drive more than 80 cars in a year, putting several hundred miles on the majority of them. But it doesn't make me feel any better about it.

So I felt really awful when I hit the pothole and it became immediately obvious that something had gone wrong with the Ford Mondeo ST TDCi I was driving. Within a few seconds, the embarrassment had been joined by a puzzled feeling, then by gloom, and some time after that by disbelief.

I was puzzled because it wasn't a very big pothole. The Mondeo didn't seem to crash down into it so much as bump across it, so I wasn't expecting an immediate puncture, nor the phenomenal racket which made it sound - though it didn't feel - as if the front left suspension was hanging off the car.

The gloom was caused by the fact that it was 11pm on a wet and windy evening, and I was six miles from the nearest street light. The disbelief came when I finally tried to remove the wheel from the hub - half of an 18" alloy came off with the tyre, but the other half stayed on.

The wheel had split completely in two, a few inches from the inner rim. I had never seen anything like it. Nor had a couple of expert friends I spoke to the following day: a garage owner had never heard of such a thing, while an advanced driving instructor and part-time fireman - who has been a to a great many road traffic accidents in his time - told me that the only time he had known of wheels splitting like this was when the rest of the car had been reduced to scrap.

But the Mondeo wasn't scrap. When I drove it away from the scene of the incident, it behaved as well as any car fitted with a spacesaver spare wheel could be expected to.

And that got me thinking very hard. It was, in the first place, amazing that a wheel would break like this (without, as far as I could see, any flaw in the metal - the break was clean all the way round). It was more amazing still that the complete destruction of a wheel could be the first result of any impact, before any damage to the steering or the suspension.

Fortunately, the wheel was on the inside of the corner when I hit the pothole, with weight being transferred away from it and on to the front right corner. In those circumstances it was possible for the tyre to hold the two halves of the wheel together. What would have happened if I'd been turning the other way, and that wheel had been more heavily loaded?

Without knowing more about the design of the Mondeo's wheels as opposed to that of any others, I can't specifically point the finger of blame at Ford or its suppliers. My concern at the moment is more general. There can't be many people who would specify steel rather than alloy wheels with a car if they could afford the latter, but alloys are more expensive, more likely to be damaged, and costlier to replace when something goes wrong. This seems a heavy price to pay for their undeniable visual appeal.

And just how strong are they? Given their importance in terms of safety, shouldn't we be able to expect that they will not be the first things to break in any accident, never mind such a minor one as an encounter with a not especially large pothole?

One last thing. I don't like spacesaver spares very much, but I was glad that Ford had fitted one to the Mondeo, rather than a couple of cans of tyre-sealing foam. There isn't a foam in the world that would hold two halves of an 18" wheel together. If I'd only had foam on board, I would have had to sleep in the car that night, and probably pay a fortune to be rescued the following morning.

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