A scary experience in the Mini on the M5 near Exeter yesterday on the way back from an excellent week in Brixham. We initially thought we’d run over something after a loud bang, but then the tyre deflated and we quickly pulled onto the hard shoulder. Turns out the front offside coil spring had snapped and then dragged on the tyre, bursting it and damaging the wheel.

After breathing a sigh of relief that we’d got to the hard shoulder safely, we then had a 2 hour wait for recovery. But our very cheap Rescue My Car policy worked wonders. The recovery truck took us to Bristol where a courtesy car was waiting for us to drive back to Birmingham. The Mini has just been delivered home a day later.

I've never had to call out roadside recovery before, only at home, so it was interesting to hear about how it all works- with local recovery trucks operating in a 100km area (to avoid tacographs?) and a whole hidden infrastructure we don’t see. When we arrived at the services there were 2 other recovery trucks off-loading broken cars onto another truck.

I was impressed that having stopped at 9am, we were still home by 3:30. Now I’ve just got to organise a repair!