How to change your car tyre: TG's foolproof six-point guide

Regardless of how far you drive, the roads you use, your general level of luck or proximity to a road spike surplus warehouse, you will have to change a tyre at some point in your driving career.

And while it’s a simple operation, there are a number of pitfalls that we want to help you avoid. Because no one wants to fall in a pit. Even the nicer Pitts, like Brad, for instance, will take umbrage if you continue to fall into them. So, as a group of fellow drivers who are concerned with your safety, wellbeing and need to read things on the internet, let’s put some words in front of each other in a manner that could possibly but might not explain the process of changing one’s own tyre.

Through rigorous real-world testing, we’ve found that tyres are much easier to change if they’re not currently rotating at hundreds of revolutions per minute. Look to Formula One for more evidence: front-running teams like Red Bull and those other ones that get a look in the one time Red Bull don't win always bring their race car to a complete stop in the pits before the pit crew attempts to change their tyres. With tyres changed, they can rejoin the race and have Crofty talk about those same tyres for the next hour.

Take a leaf from Red Bull F1, then, and bring your car to a complete stop before attempting to change a tyre. Also insist that others who would like you to change their tyres follow the same championship-winning strategy that Red Bull employs.

On the other hand, make sure not to take a leaf from Crofty’s book, which would be a 5,000-page tome on tyre degradation that repeats itself every hundred words or so.

This, for the Americans among you, is also referred to as a ‘tyre iron’.

Nine times out of ten, your tyre iron will be in the boot of your car. But, every now and then, it can be somewhere else entirely. So take a moment to think. Did you go to a track day and take it out because its weight was costing you precious tenths per lap? Are you Bear Grylls, and did you use it as a makeshift splint the last time you broke your leg?

If you find yourself in any of these scenarios, it is largely unfeasible to change your own tyre.

Loosening the wheel nuts while the car is still on the ground is an often-overlooked step. Should you jack the car up first, then attempt to loosen the wheel nuts, the rotational force you apply to undo the wheel nuts is transferred to the whole wheel, rotating it instead. And look at that! We managed to sneak some actual advice into this article.

And how about two pieces of actual advice? Be sure to undo the wheel nuts of the wheel that has the tyre you need to change, otherwise it will be exceedingly difficult to change the correct tyre.

Before lifting the car at all, ensure that it’s on a flat surface and a safe location. A solid piece of concrete is a good start but falls down if it’s attached to a tower block that’s about to be demolished.

Make sure the parking brake is on and that you’re in gear, so the car resists rolling away. Also, crucially, turn the car off before exiting, as a car that’s in gear with the engine running has a tendency to want to go places. For added safety, you can place a chock under the wheel that’s opposite to the one you’re changing. It’s important that whatever you use to chock the wheel is a) readily available, b) dense enough not to be squashed and rolled over and c) something you couldn’t possibly care about if it gets ruined. The novels of E.L. James fit that bill.

With that sorted, it’s time to avail yourself of the jack. The jack supplied with the car is the most obvious solution, but, if you’re changing your tyre at home or the home of a friend with useful tools, you can avail yourself of pneumatic jacks, hydraulic jacks or floor jacks.

Locate the proper jacking points for your car. The modern car is quite a heavy beast, so placing your jack anywhere but these specific hard points will result in creative reinterpretations of how doors should fit, whether exhaust pipes should be crimped halfway along and how long a fuel tank should ideally store fuel.

If you’ve been following our instructions so far, you should be standing next to a car that is parked, safely restrained from rolling away, and jacked up on one corner to allow easy access to the wheel you intend to remove. If you find yourself in any situation other than this, feel free to not blame this set of instructions.

If, on the other hand, you’ve followed our instructions and haven’t wreaked a trail of destruction, well done! Pat yourself on the back, because we are unable to do so from here.

Now, it’s time to undo the wheel nuts. They’ll already be loose, so you should be able to undo them completely, just with your fingers. If they’re still tight, use the wheel brace until they’re loose enough.

In the good old days – which were actually bad but seem much better when compared to modern life – cars came with a spare wheel. And this, more often than not, also came with a spare tyre around it.

So, at this point in proceedings, one would simply exchange the wheel with the flat tyre for the wheel with the spare tyre, do the wheel nuts back up to finger tightness, let the car back down onto its wheels, fully tighten the wheel nuts with the wheel brace, stick the ruined tyre and jack in the boot, and drive away.

But as we’re no longer living in the slightly-better-than-now days, we’re often forced to grapple with a raft of space- and weight-saving tyre repair kits that range from the entirely useless to the mostly entirely useless. In theory, you’re supposed to be able to remove the offending nail, screw, bolt or Amazonian dart, plug the hole with some horrible-looking goop, reinflate the tyre and be on your merry way. In practice, you’re probably just as well off trying to eat your tyre repair kit as use it. So, take a moment to appreciate progress. Then take several hundred more moments to appreciate it. That recovery van will be a while.