Fiat Panda Selecta
The Panda faces puncture peril at the height of rush hour, but help’s at hand for our Fiat
1993 FIAT PANDA 1.1 SELECTA
Rewind back to just before Christmas, and it really wasn’t a time to be driving. The roads were packed and tempers were frayed. Unfortunately, I’d typically left much of my shopping and personal deliveries to the last minute, which meant that I had no choice but to brave the seasonal maelstrom.
On one trip into Peterborough, I came across a recent accident where a modern MINI had tried to overtake a car and ended up side-swiping an oncoming coach. MINIs may be the size of a small bungalow, these days, but it had still come off worse. Debris was scattered across the road and there was no choice but to gingerly drive through it.
Before long, the Panda’s offside front tyre had completely deflated. With time definitely not on my side, I decided to aim for the nearest petrol station – luckily just a few hundred yards away – and see if some air would re-inflate it, even temporarily. It did – but not for long. Without any suitable tools, I contemplated the RAC but then realised that it would probably be a hours before help arrived on such a busy day. Besides, I was a little embarrassed that I didn’t have the right tyre-changing equipment.
I knew there was a tyre place nearby, so I decided to risk driving the Panda there, very slowly and with hazards on. It was closed. So was the second one. By the time I found one that was open – Kwik Fit, about a mile away – the tyre had completely given up the ghost, despite en route inflations from my portable compressor. Initially I asked for the spare to be put on – to the amusement of the young fitter when he found it was under the bonnet, on a car that was older than he was. But then I just decided to bite the bullet and go for a completely new tyre, however unwelcome the £69.99 for the Hankook 155/65 R13 was on top of all the other Christmas expenditure.