Renault Mégane RS 300

Rapidly wearing rubber means it’ll soon be time for a change

I VISITED THE EXCELLENT NORTH Yorkshire Moors Railway recently, the preserved line that runs steam trains from Pickering to Whitby via Goathland, where they filmed the TV series Heartbeat way back. It’s a different way of seeing the moors that we’ve used for photoshoots so often in the past. Unfortunately, coming back to the Mégane in the unmetalled car park at the end of the day I discovered that it had a right-rear puncture.

There was no apparent damage to the sidewalls so rather than simply chuck in the goo and pump it up, I decided to just pump it up and see how quickly it lost pressure. Turns out it was a slow puncture and we got the 150 miles home before it had lost more than a few PSI, according to the handy on-board monitor. We did make one stop though, to look at the spectacular sunset from Sutton Bank on the A170. The Mégane looked amazing in the soft glow of the evening.

A couple of days later I got it into the local tyre depot and they were able to fix the puncture. I’m sure they were glad not to get covered in puncture goo. It gave me cause to check all the other tyres and I discovered that the front Bridgestones are getting close to the legal limit. Not great at just 5000 miles but I expect they had a hard time before the car became our long-termer, including in our own group test (evo 290). Seems like an excellent opportunity to try a set of Bridgestone’s long-awaited (some would say long overdue) new Potenza Sport tyres, as featured in last month’s tyre test.

Date acquired July 2021 Total Mileage 5076 Mileage this month 1126 Costs this month £0 mpg this month 31.4