So I had literally just gotten this new camera and mounted it as a rear-facing to review after my race and 1 lap into the race at turn 11 of Gingerman, my left rear wheel detached.

Turns out it was a complete hub failure to blame (makes me happy I have a cheap race car to play with!)

BTW: The car was fixed by 10:30pm with a replacement spindle/hub/brake/wheel and was back on track the next day for more fun! Gotta love a quick fix for something that seems so drastic!

Video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWvqu3askGs

Damaged parts here:

 

Wow that is crazy. I've never seen that happen before. Kinda scary. Definitely an awesome video though.

 

Some factors to keep in mind with this failure:

- This hub/spindle/wheel bearing was original to the car - body had 80,099 miles on it at the time of failure
- It has been a race car since 2000 and I can't even begin to count the amount of track time it has seen (at least 25K miles is my best guess)
- I have had that side of the car hit 3 times over the past 3 years and never changed the rear hub or wheel bearing after any of those hits (front wheel and hub/bearing gets changed approximately once a season due to wear

 

How does one prevent these types of failures other than replacing the whole car every 2.9 years?

 

Replace after serious impact.

 

or even just replace PART after minor impact (no need to replace the whole car) as was the case with me (some side hit rubbing) so lesson learned about impact repairs

 

At least you have a video of the failure =]

 

lol.. yes, true enough...

 

I've seen this happen; entering turn 6 at Laguna I noticed my buddy in his v8 Miata in front of me was slowing down and as I hit the apex of the turn saw a wheel/tire rolling down the hill at me! Long story short he had forgotten to tighten the axle nut when first building it and dyno tuned it/drove it around the block that way before noticing and tightening it down. Theory is that put enough stress on it to cause the failure.

How old were your wheel bearings? They are a wear item.... especially in a spec miata if you are hitting curbs and dropping wheels all the time.

 

See previous post where I already mentioned the factors in my case.. We believe the failure was due to several circumstances (3 hits in 3 years on that side of the car along with being original to the car in our case)

Best part is the damage overall was minor and we had the car back on the track the following day. Even the wheel and tire were still usable (no bent wheel and only slightly shaved the tire a bit more) and the wheel just needed to be rebalanced!

I have since done 3 other races as well as a DE track day since this happened BTW and the new one is holding up just fine