Practical Motoring and Goodyear Autocare have announced the winner for their ‘Win $500 worth of car tyres’ competition.

PRACTICAL MOTORING and Goodyear Autocare would like to congratulate Steve Dominguez for winning its ‘Win $500 worth of car tyres’ competition where readers were invited to enter by providing a tyre story that could help fellow readers. Steve entered early and shared, as our judges said, “A well-written, entertaining story that also made several very good points about tyre safety. Congrats Steve, we hope you enjoy your new rubber!”

Practical Motoring’s technical editor, Robert Pepper is going to take all the stories from our other entries and putting them into a handful of tyre-related technical articles. The first one will be published on Thursday.

Until then, here’s what our winning entry looked like: 

“Last week a mate in his F250 and I in my Jeep went out some local trails in Alice Springs. Shortly into the trails we were noticing consistently that the F250 was skirting along both edges of the trails, and conditions were a bit tougher for the big Ford.

“On an innocuous section of downhill track the F250 moved a rock on the edge of the trail which rolled forward with the rear tyre, until coming to rest against another rock in the trail, creating a fist-sized hole in the side wall of a brand new mud terrain.

“Changing the tyre was an experience, as with no flat terrain to roll to, we needed to change out the rear on about a 20 degree downslope. The front right wheel was rolled onto a trail washoff to create full articulation at the rear for a bush tyre change and wheel removal commenced. After the tyre was removed it was thrown into the back of the tray with gusto, which created a shift in weight and caused the F250 to roll forward about 6 inches down the far side of the washout and rest the rear hub firmly on the ground.

“At this point the bottle jack was introduced to assist lifting the axle enough to replace the 35” tyre. 
The bottle jack was unable to produce the lift required, and the shovel was added to the mix to dig out the rocks from underneath the exposed right rear. 

“My friend did not now how old his tyre was, which was a great opportunity for educating on tyre dating marks, something I’ve taken to checking recently while looking for my next tyre replacement. 30 minutes after we stopped, we were back in motion on a very old spare (tyre date 4003) and we limped out of the trails, and home to a couple of cool drinks under the verandah on a 40-degree day.

“In conclusion we learned/reminded ourselves on some tyre changing pearls of wisdom- try to find flat ground to change a tyre, always chock the wheels not involved in the change where possible, don’t throw the tyre into the back of the ute while on a hill, check the date of the spare, and where possible, run Goodyear tyres (my Jeep is on Goodyear Silent Armours!) so you don’t get a flat to begin with.”

Again, from all of us at Practical Motoring and Goodyear Autocare congratulations Steve and a big thanks to all those who entered. We’ve got plenty more competitions coming up, so keep checking out Practical Motoring for your chance to win great prizes, and read awesome articles…