An update on this.

I duly submitted my EC261 claim, the narrative of which I am happy to post here if anybody is interested. This morning I got a call from a nice lady in BA Customer Relations. She apologized for the delay and offered to reimburse any out of pocket expenses we had incurred.

She then went on to explain that the delay was actually caused by a multiple bird-strike to the scheduled aircraft (which she confirmed as G-XLEE) damaging an engine, and not - according to her technical report - any damage to the tyre. The European Court of Justice has, of course, ruled that bird-strikes are indeed an exceptional circumstance that negates an EU 261 claim (Pešková and Peška –v- Travel Service A.S. C-315/15).

She asked me from where I had got my information as to the cause, which was in my submission: the captain and CSM of the replacement aircraft as well as basource.com. I note, although did not mention, that Jumbodriver has reported on here on a separate but related thread about this incident and another :
" Neither were actually tyre bursts either. One was some tread detaching from a main wheel and hitting the wing, and the other was a nose wheel damaged by a push back tug".

We left it that she would do some further enquiries and come back to me, and has just emailed me saying inter alia, : "As discussed, I've sent asked our Flight Investigations team to look into the reason for your delay in more detail. I'll contact you as soon as I have more information. For my part I said that I would ask for a deadlock letter and go to straight to MCOL if my claim was eventually rejected. I also mentioned that I did hope that BA had made a genuine mistake in the info she had been given, rather than was trying to deliberately deceive me .

All perfectly amicable (after all she isn't writing the script she has to use), but let's see what happens. Anybody out there hear about a multiple bird-strike to G-XLEE on 17th September?