I would appreciate some advice on some problems I've had with my fiesta. On Sunday afternoon I was driving and the engine unexpectedly and very quickly began to overheat. I stopped driving when the temp gauge shot up, and we put warm water into the coolant tank and that seemed to solve the problem sufficiently for me to get the last mile or so to my parents' house.

I had a long journey in front of me so I called the RAC to come out and look at it. The engineer took the car a short drive and concluded that it seemed to be fine i.e. it was no longer over-heating. I was a bit uneasy about driving it, despite his assessment, so after further discussions, he agreed to follow me into his garage (about 10 miles away) and he would check the car over there again before I continued my journey to Glasgow (over 100 miles).

I had no further problems until just after I made a stop in a small town (Inveraray), about 75 miles into my journey. A few minutes after I left Inveraray, I noticed a change in the gauge. It was very slight initially so I carried on tentatively for a few minutes - but it seemed to be creeping up further, so I pulled over into the driveway of a house off the main road, about 3.5 miles from Inveraray, and called the RAC again.

For reasons which I still don't know - and won't go into further here - after several hours the RAC advised that they couldn't attend my breakdown. By this point I was alone at 11pm on a Sunday evening, in a remote place in the freezing cold - so I took a chance and drove the car back to Inveraray. It had been sitting cold for a few hours so it didn't appear to overheat on that small journey.

I checked into a hotel and the next morning a recovery vehicle finally turned up. The engineer asked if the car could be driven and I explained that I'd been forced to drive it the night before, to get back to Inveraray, but it had driven ok. He asked me to drive it up the street to where it could be loaded onto the recovery vehicle. The car drove ok (it was only about 100m). The engineer then took over, to get it onto the recovery vehicle. He had trouble driving it up the steep ramps onto the recovery vehicle and there was a lot of white and black smoke coming out of the exhaust as he did so. Afterwards, he said the lack of power in the car suggested it had blown a gasket. I hadn't noticed a loss of power before that. My worry, therefore, is that I am now dealing with a burst radiator AND a gasket problem. Any ideas?

I got my car dropped off at my usual Ford garage in Glasgow but they have not yet fully assessed it. They called initially to say that I needed a new coolant hose only (which I couldn't believe - given I'd already told them I had a radiator problem!) - and they then backtracked and said they couldn't check the radiator etc because they couldn't get the system to hold water, so they need to fix the new hose first. This is apparently going to cost £173.

I feel very unsure that I am being given good service by the garage and I also feel like, due to the terrible service from the RAC, I might have ended up causing more damage to the car than I started out with - but I'm not at all confident I can prove that. Apologies for such a long post - I'm not very technical when it comes to cars, so I might have got some of the terminology wrong and I found it quite hard to explain without telling a big long story!