YOUR VIEWS
WRITE TO
autocar@haymarket.com
Cold snap
Chris Drewett (the excellent Shelsley Walsh commentator, I assume?) talked about a coil spring breakage on his Mercedes-Benz SLK (30 June).
Ican concur. In December 2008, my wife and I were driving up to Scotland to celebrate New Year with friends. The weather was bitterly cold – well below zero. From our home in Worcestershire, we stopped at Tebay on theM6for some food, then on again before stopping, as we always did, north of Inverness to buy food andhaveameal.AsIlet the clutch in to depart, there wasaclonkand the front of the car dropped suddenly.
The cheery RAC man, as the car was loaded onto the recovery wagon in a snowstorm, had a logical explanation: “You’ve had a really long journey up here, during which everything under the bonnet has got really warm. Leaving it stationary in this car park for well over an hour in freezing weather has then allowed all those parts to cool down again, and the coil spring cried ‘enough’. It happens quite regularly up here.”