I believe one of the worst situation when driving on a race track is to loose a wheel. It happened to me! While driving at Mt-Tremblant, I exited the last corner before the paddock on only three wheels while I entered the corner on four. Now, even if this failure did not end up with a car banging the wall, it's not a ride I would suggest to anybody.
944 Turbo are fantastic cars, powerful, reliable and fast but one of it's Achilles heel is
the ball joint, a-arm complex. At the time of failure, the car had less than 50,000km, had not been lowered below 13' and was riding on Khumos V-700. The a-arm was rebuild during the inter-season in order to prevent a ball joint failure. Yes, the plastic bushing was worn out and cracked creating a small play in the ball joint. you can click on the pictures to see where the joint broke. It snapped right at the junction of the spindle. It looks as if the constant flex of the ball joint, resulting from the hard braking on the track while being fully loaded on the left wheel, created enough stress to break it.
It's probably one of the reason Porsche decided to change the design of the replacement a-arms in order to make it almost impossible to rebuild. They probably figured that the metal being constantly stressed would break after a while. For these reasons I don't recommend rebuilding an a-arms.
Instead, buy a genuine brand new a-arm or install our racing Chromaloy a-arms.
