Breakages - "Have we got a ..."

Well this minor dingle occurred at the Harvey short course track after the back-end of the car stepped-out after coming out of a left-hand corner (possibly on some tree roots).  The car bounced off a rather large tree about 50m past the corner and the damage is as you can see.  Surprisingly, the components that were visibly damaged were just the lower control arm, the radius arm (z-bar) bush, tie-rod linkage and the damper pin running through strut cap (which had been bent).  It is almost impossible to know exactly how much damage is done to certain components in an accident like this, so (probably because the front suspension/steering is so important) we replaced just about everything bar the brake caliper and strut.

Well, we were having some problems with the studs in the rear wheels and had managed to break 15 in total, several of which fell off with the wheel nuts (so we were running out of those as well).  I know they reckon Hyden is rough, but heh, it's not that rough!

It turned out to be a combination of a couple of things.  We'd assumed that all the rims were drilled to take the same wheel nuts, however a couple (one of which we had on the car) used tapered nuts instead of flat.  This meant the washers were being crushed and the nuts were coming loose.  Secondly, the rims didn't seat well on the hub, meaning the wheel nuts were taking far more vertical load than what they were designed for.  We fixed both of those issues, plus went to a larger stud size (see the Tyres and Rims section) soon after this incident.

This tyre let go towards the end of the quad-cam's first dyno session.  The missing tread managed to part the cable connecting the hand controller to the dyno, before embedding itself in the roof of the factory unit about 20m away.