Hang your heads in shame, men of Britain, your counterparts on the other side of the Irish Sea are much more tyre savvy – and chivalrous – than you! This blow to the nation’s collective self-esteem comes courtesy of a survey conducted by Continental, which reveals that, perhaps, tyres may not always bring out what’s best in us.

Men in the UK are much more likely to leave changing a tyre to a woman driver than men in Ireland, says Conti. Nearly half of us would be perfectly happy to sit back while she throws some muscle behind hoisting the car’s jack into position, where only three out of ten gents from the Emerald Isle would do the same. And a third of British men confessed to using any excuse to weasel their way out of the task, compared with just one in seven Irish men.

And, to further rub salt into the wound, we’re not just un-gallant when it comes to tyres – when the rubber hits the road we’re also much more afraid of dealing with the rubber that hits the road. Almost all men surveyed in Ireland – 94 per cent of them – claimed to have changed a tyre at some time, compared with just over half of men in Britain. Conti reports that the most commonly used reason for not changing a car tyre was that it might ruin one’s clothes. This excuse was used by a whopping 47 per cent of UK based respondents.