THE owner of a Peugeot car said he felt "sick to the stomach" after a late-night attack by a vandal which left its roof caved in.

A footprint on the bonnet showed that someone had walked over the front of the streamlined 206 GTi before jumping up and down on the roof, he said, leaving a deep diagonal crease from back to front.

Darren Hale, of Adkin Way, Wantage, said the internal roof support bars were bent by the force of the attack, and the interior headlining had been stretched and would need replacing.

Mr Hale, a 33-year-old maintenance engineer at the UKAEA site at Harwell, feared the dark blue 2000-registered vehicle, which he bought for £4,300 four years ago, could be written off because of the prohibitive cost of repairing the damage.

As he waited for the Peugeot to be collected for assessment by body repairers and his insurers, he said: "I'd be really gutted if that happened."

He believed the attack took place some time after 1am on Saturday, March 17, which is when he went to bed at the terraced home he shares with his fiancée, Kate Tatum.

"The car alarm must have gone off, but I never heard anything. But it was a windy night and I sleep at the back of the house and not overlooking the road outside, where the car was parked," he said.

"What I find hard to believe is that with such a large number of houses and windows overlooking this road, no one appears to have seen or heard anything."

A Thames Valley Police spokesman said they had no reports to suggest there had been a spate of attacks on vehicles in the area that night.