Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

Over the weekend, I was planning to carry on working on the
Eng Refresh but disrupted by the slow puncture on the Mazda MX-5.

Didn’t notice anything strange Friday evening and wanted to wash the
car on Saturday when I found the FL tyre was very low on the
tyre pressure.




Removed the wheel and found this.

Some sort of spring wedged in the tread causing slow puncture.
Normally, the puncture will occur at the rear tyre while driving at speed
because the front tyre collects the object and then shoot into the rear tyre
and then it will be pressed down against the road surface resulting in puncture.

As soon as I removed the spring, the air just escaped.
Fortunately, I noticed it before moving the car so the wheel and the
tyre structure were not damaged.

The spring still looked very shiny with little scratch marking and being at the
front tyre, it must have been picked up very close to my place at low speed.

It was rubbish bin day on Friday for my local area so probably it was picked up
on the way back to my place.




The puncture was just outside of the ‘easy to repair’ area and in the
‘repairable’ section of the tread but after discussing with the tyre people
about the cost and considering the amount of tread left with already 15K miles
covered and being 5 years old, didn’t feel like worth repairing it.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to get hold of Toyo T1-R in this size (195/55/14)
these days and considering the latest tyre technology, wanted to use something
different as I’ll be replacing all four as a set.


First puncture in 21 years for this MX-5 so not too bad.

Probably going for the Michelin Energy Saver + in 185/60/14 and
see how it goes.

Always things such as tyre puncture, main relay failure, etc happens at
the most inconvenient and one of the busiest time of the year......

Needs to sort the tyre fast as my boss drives MX-5 everyday and I don't want her
to drive it with that super narrow width temporary tyre.
Drove it to the petrol station and it just felt awful.....

Kaz