Race Across the World star issues warning after son’s car death

The mother of former Race Across the World contestant Sam Gardiner is urging motorists to do regular safety checks on their tyres after the death of her son in a crash.

An inquest into Mr Gardiner’s death found insufficient tyre tread was a contributing factor in the collision which led to his death.

The 24-year-old had been driving on the A34 near Manchester when his car left the road and rolled before landing on its side in May this year, Greater Manchester Police said.

Ms Gardiner told BBC Breakfast that the lack of tyre tread was “a massive contributory factor” in the collision and “even if it [speaking out] helps one person be aware then that’s very important”.

Mr Gardiner was travelling from Greater Manchester back to Scotland where he worked as a landscape gardener when his car crashed on the evening of 26 May.

He was the only person in the vehicle and was taken to hospital where he died from his injuries three days later, his family said.

His car had hit the central reservation and it was thought it then aquaplaned across and off the road, Ms Gardiner said.

“He wasn’t actually breaking the speed limit but he was driving too fast for the conditions as it was really wet that night.”

Ms Gardiner said that while her son’s car had relatively new tyres, the tread on two of them was low, rendering them illegal.

She said raising awareness of the importance of regular tyre safety checks was important to her and she did not want others to “lose their son to find [this] out”.

Ms Gardiner said she had given her son a device to check tyre pressure on the long journeys between Manchester and Scotland but neither she nor Mr Gardiner had given much thought to tyre tread beyond the vehicle passing its annual MOT.

“It had never occurred to me before that the reason tyres have tread is to disperse water so if they are low the water isn’t dispersed, so you can get no grip on the road and you lose control completely,” she said.

Department for Transport figures published in October showed that in the past five years 153 people were killed or seriously injured because of defective tyres.

Stuart Lovatt, chair of the Tyre Safe charity, said their research suggested only one in five people were checking their tyres regularly while three in five people, and young people in particular, never checked their tyres at all.

He described it as “a real concern to us”.

Mr Lovatt urged people to check the manufacturer’s recommendations for tyre pressure which can be found on the petrol cap or inside the door frame of a vehicle.

Meanwhile, research published by Cardiff University has found one in six second-hand cars had dangerous tyres – equating to about 1.2m cars on the roads.