The roadside assistance technician pulled the flat wheel off and, as Peter Petrella tells it, said, “I have never seen anything like this before.” Stuck in the tire was a wrench. “An entire wrench,” Petrella says.
Petrella, who posts on TikTok as @peterpetrella, told the story from the front seat of a car on June 4, 2026, under the on screen line “Wait until the end….” A second line of text spells it out: “WRENCH IN THE TIRE.” The flat was on his fiancée’s car, and his caption adds, “Less than 1k miles on it too.”
He says it started with a text from her that day: “I have a flat tire.” She had gone to get her passport made, was inside for a couple of hours and came back out to it. His first reaction was a shrug. “It is what it is. Florida has a lot of construction,” he remembers telling her. The plan was routine: call roadside assistance, “throw the spare on,” and then “either patch it if it’s in a good place, or we’ll get a new tire.”
She waited in the car for about an hour. Nobody could see what had caused the flat, and he explains why: “The actual hole was on the bottom, so she couldn’t see until they got the tire off.”
Petrella was not home yet when he recorded the first half. He says he was stopping to pick her up a rotisserie chicken, “cause that’s what she’s gonna need at this time,” and he tells viewers, “You and I are gonna be seeing this for the first time together.” A cut later he reports there was no rotisserie chicken, so it is popcorn chicken.
The Wheel in the Cargo Area and the Wrench Halfway In
At home the camera turns to the open cargo area of her car, where the wheel, a Honda badge on its center cap, is lying flat. A brown paper bag is still in his hand. The first words heard are “Oh, my god. You’re joking.”
The close shots show the closed ring end of a wrench standing straight out of the middle of the tread. He takes hold of it. “The actual wrench part,” he says, “this is, like, halfway in.” The video ends there, with the wrench still in the tire.
What to Do When the Thing in Your Tire Is Bigger Than a Nail
Leave it in, as it still is in the last frame of his video. His own plan depended on where the hole was, patch it “if it’s in a good place” or replace the tire, and a tire shop can judge the location and size of the hole best with the object still sitting in it.
Film it the way he did before anyone touches it: a wide shot of the whole wheel, then close shots of where the object sits in the tread and how far it sticks out, with your hand in the frame for scale. Get the odometer in a photo too. His caption says the tire had under 1,000 miles on it, and that is a number worth being able to show.
Take that mileage to whoever sold the tire, or to the dealer if the tires came on a new car, and ask whether it carries any road hazard coverage. Bring the photos, the tire and the object that came out of it. Ask the roadside technician for a copy of the service record before he leaves, since he is the one who saw it first.
If you walk around a flat and cannot find the cause, it may be where hers was, on the bottom against the pavement. Do not roll the car forward on the flat to look for it. Wait for the wheel to come off, as she did.
The whole plan in this story rested on one sentence, “we’ll throw the spare on.” Before you need it, open the cargo floor and confirm your car has a spare, that it holds air, and that the jack and lug wrench are with it. When roadside fits it, ask how far and how fast you should drive on it on the way to the tire shop.