A woman who was killed in a car crash in August had a nail in her tyre which could have caused her to lose control of her car, an inquest heard today.

Alison Kelly, 29, a trainee horse riding instructor at Shardeloes Farm in Amersham, died on the evening on August 25 after her blue Peugeot 307 was involved in a crash on the A355 near Coleshill with a silver VW Golf and a black Mercedes SLK at around 6.30pm.  

Ms Kelly was driving to her family home in Waterlooville, Hampshire, that evening for a bridesmaid dress fitting for her sister’s wedding.  

The driver of the black Mercedes, Carl Hughes, said he was driving towards Amersham when a ‘dark car’ coming from the other direction clipped the rear offside of his vehicle before ‘snaking from side to side’ down the road.

He said: “It happened in a flash. I heard a loud bang and realised there had been a large smash further down the road.”   

Witness Lesley Hawkes, who was also driving towards Amersham, told the court a blue car coming towards her appeared to ‘wobble’.

She said: “It was going side to side like a fish tail. I thought that didn’t look right. I pulled over to the left as far as I could to prevent it hitting me.

“I saw in my mirror it had hit a silver car. I knew it had been a bad accident.”

The driver of the silver Golf, who was seriously injured in the crash and airlifted to hospital, was not called as a witness in Ms Kelly’s inquest as he could not recall what had happened.

Thames Valley Police collision investigator, Gary Baldwin, said the speedometer on Ms Kelly’s car had frozen on 52mph, indicating she was not breaking the speed limit.

Mr Baldwin said the position of Ms Kelly’s seatbelt suggested she wasn’t wearing it at the time of the crash, however, it was a nail in her rear offside tyre that had left it significantly flat and could have affected the car’s performance.

Mr Baldwin said: “The rear offside tyre would have been the one doing all the work as the car went into the bend. All the weight of the car would have been on that side. The car would not have been responding as expected.  

“This tyre had lost so much pressure. It was almost visibly losing air. If she had looked at [the tyre] before she left that evening, it may have looked ok. [The nail] certainly wasn’t something she had picked up a week before.”

Coroner Richard Hulett recorded a conclusion of death by road traffic collision, saying the nail had ‘played a part’.

Speaking after the inquest, Ms Kelly’s father Robert paid tribute to the ‘apple of my eye’.

He said: “She was so loved and is so badly missed. She was incredibly popular, there were 200 people at her funeral. She was a people person, very bubbly and she made friends with people almost instantaneously.”

Mr Kelly said that they decided to go ahead with her sister Caroline’s wedding on September 5, 11 days after Ms Kelly died and turned it into a ‘double celebration.’

He said: “We wanted her there with us and she was. We had a book in the corner and we didn’t want people to say things like ‘sorry for your loss’ we wanted quotes from people.

“We raised £370 for the air ambulance. They were at the scene of the crash and they are such a good cause.”