A few weeks ago I went to Carolinas Motorsports Park. I was just planning on instructing for the Carolinas Region PCA, but a friend of mine, Kevin King, was nice enough to let me drive his 944 turbo some over the weekend. This was good news, but it didn't take long for things to start going wrong.
Kevin King decided to let me go out first and give the car a shake down because it had been a while since he had driven the car on the track. I made about 4 or 5 laps before the brakes started to substantially fade. Unfortunately it took too long to bleed the brakes for Kevin King to make it out for his first session on track. I felt responsible for him missing his session, but he made it clear to me that he was glad that I was driving because he felt that I was better equipped to handle the car in that situation than he was.
Once we got the brakes bled, I took the car out on track again to make sure that they were not going to fad again. It was on the third lap that I was no longer worried about the brakes. I was in the middle of the carousel that I hear a loud bang come from the car. At the same time that I heard the sound, the car went extremely loose. I was able to keep the car on the track, but it was with great effort. I finished the lap slowly, but even at the low speed i was traveling, the car was very hard to drive around turns.
When I made it back to the pits, I was fairly confident that a sway bar had broken. I first started to look under the rear of the car. I couldn't find anything that was obviously the cause of the cars handling issues. I started to look under the front of the car after I had ruled out all the parts of the rear that I thought could have caused the car to get so loose. When I looked under the right front of the car, I immediately saw what had failed on the car. The drop link that connected the sway bar to the control arm had broken.
I felt bad knowing that I had driven Kevin king's car twice and had had problems with it twice. After we had examined the part that failed in detail, we decided that it had failed because of a manufacturing defect. This made me feel a little better, but I still felt responsible. The last thing I wanted was for people to think that the car broken because I was driving it.
The sway bar breaking was definitely a learning experience as I had never had a part of the suspension fail when I was driving. The sway bar breaking also has made me a little more nervous when I drive someone else's car because I don't want to be responsible for something breaking. Luckily, the sway bar breaking wasn't my fault in this instance and I want to keep it that way.
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