Had a fun experience today.
Car was full of stuff, I was driving to Chester on the motorway, i'd driven about 15 miles, and I heard a very loud whistling coming from the front passenger side of the car.
I thought "that can't be good, sounds to me like a piece of trim has come off, probably part of the undertray". Started slowing down and went into the left lane, got to about 60 MPH and there was a massive bump from under the passenger wheel and a loud scraping noise. It was the arch liner. When I bought the car, almost all the screws holding the liner in place were missing for some reason, and I stupidly didn't replace them.
Managed to get off the motorway and pull up in an industrial estate. When I stopped the car the arch liner was totally knackered. I considered calling the AA as it wasn't driveable and I had no tools to remove the liner, but I had no credit on my phone and apparently it's not free to call them. Tried topping up, but it wouldn't let me, and I wasn't going to leave my car full of about a grand's worth of stuff unattended, so I set off fixing the problem myself.
I didn't have my toolkit with me, but luckily I had some lineman's pliers lying in my boot, which I used to cut through the hanging liner which was grazing the tyre. That plastic is an awful lot tougher to cut than it looks. I'm quite surprised that the tyre wasn't damaged, luckily everything seems okay. Managed to temporarily fix the problem and carry on to Chester, but i'm getting a new arch liner ASAP. Can't see it doing much harm being damaged for about 100 miles or so. If I hadn't had those pliers with me I don't know what I would have done.
Here is a picture of the liner hanging out.
It's always worth carrying a few basic tools in case something like this happens. Or, even better, make sure your wheel arch liner is secured properly! I'm very lucky there was no damage to the tyre, a blowout at 70 MPH would
not be fun.