The Failed Wheel
The wheel that failed on the pothole was a BBS wheel made in Germany.
Here are some pictures.
Grr! Potholes
Last night, I had to go into Newmarket to get some shopping.
Unfortunately, I hit a very deep pothole in the dark and it completely ripped the tyre off the wheel of the Jaguar. Now, you could say that this was because the tyres were worn and dangerous! But the car had its MOT on Monday and as it needed a new tyre soon, I got them all checked and ATS in Newmarket fitted two new tyres that day. So the tyres were tip-top.
I’d not put a jacket in the car and as I was late because of the puncture, I didn’t change the wheel last night. So I just left the car a about a hundred metres from where the damage happened on the Dullingham Road into Newmarket and then I had the expense of a taxi to get home. I then realised why I don’t use taxis in Newmarket. They are very expensive.
So now, I’m going to take the Lotus and go and replace the wheel on the Jaguar, before driving that to the repairers. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get the Jaguar back later in the day with a new boot.
I’m also going to try to find the pothole and take some pictures.
These pictures are the ones I took when I returned on the Saturday morning.
Pothole 1 - Newmarket-Dullingham Road
This was the first possible culprit I found and it is almost 10 cm. deep.
Pothole 2 - Newmarket-Dullingham Road
This one was equally deep, but I suspect too narrow for the wide tyres on the Jaguar.
Potholes 3 and 4 - Newmarket-Dullingham Road
I think one of these two caused the puncture. Note how the road has broken away from where it was repaired. As someone was going the other way at the time, it would have been impossible to avoid going into the holes. Again the holes were about 10 cm. deep.
At least when I got to the car it was still where I parked it in a quiet street.
A Puncture
It didn’t look too bad.
In fact, when I got the wheel off and replaced it with the usual silly drive-home spare, it looked almost intact. Which I thought was good as I’d driven the car perhaps a hundred metres from the dark, where the puncture happened to the lighted street on the edge of Newmarket.
It was only when I looked at the wheel fully, that I realised what had happened.
Jaguar Alloy Wheel Failure
Note the perfect crack all of the way round.
One thing that has to be said though, is that the tyre held everything together and it did not appear that any other damage was done to the car. I think I was lucky.
So why did the wheel fail?
I was not travelling that fast and was probably doing about 50 mph or so, as it was dark, wet and I was in no particular hurry. I think that sort of catastrophic failure at a higher speed would probably have meant the disintegration of the tyre. In any case, the car was very controllable and I was able to slow it down very easily. This again would probably be impossible at a high speed, as the imbalance in the wheel would probably have caused everything to go very wobbly. There was no vibration at all.
I just wonder if it was one of those occurrences where the frequency induced by hitting the pothole was exactly that of the wheel and that caused the splitting of the rim. I might have hit both potholes 3 and 4 and this double blow could have caused it. But I only heard one loud bang, which I now presume was the wheel splitting.
I have worked in this field of whirling shafts and weights, and there are some very strange phenomena, when you compute everything properly.
When I changed the wheel, I took the car to ATS and the mechanic there said he’d never seen a wheel split like that. Especially, after they had checked all the wheels and tyres earlier in the week.
I have sinced searched the Internet for anything similar and have found this report by David Finlay. The car in question in his report was a new high-performance diesel Mondeo, with the same engine to the X-Type.
As my Jaguar was made by Ford, are the wheels made by the same company? They look fairly similar.
Toy Oh Dear
Toyota has a few problems. Not only do accelerators stick on some models, but now the Prius has a brake problem.
These may be serious and they are probably hurting Toyota’s image and the company will suffer for years to come.
The problems are very different. The accelerator is a mechanical design fault and the brake is a software one. But if you have the first, here is excellent advice from the BBC. I know you’ll be unlikely to be able to access this advice if you have a problem, but make sure that you read it.
The trouble is that we assume are cars are perfect, the roads are perfect, the weather is always fine and nothing untoward will ever happen as we drive along in our cars listening to the Beatles, smoking fags and eating sandwiches. I don’t do the last two as I abhor smoking and can’t eat bread, unless I make the gluten-free variety myself, but I hope you get the point.
We must have more driver education to make the roads safer and dare I say it allow everybody to enjoy driving more. It’s a great pleasure to drive a car fast and legally down a challenging and empty road.
I have two cars; a Lotus Elan and a Jaguar X-Type Estate.
The Lotus is simple with no-ABS, no-traction control, no-air conditioning and very little electronics to go wrong. It incidentally has a full electronic control system on the lump that does the work under the bonnet. The Jaguar has all these, but other than body styles, the two cars are both manual gearboxes, front-wheel drive, full leather etc.
Now when it comes to bad roads, the Elan is in a class of its own compared to the Jag. The ABS and traction control cuts in on the latter and makes things more rather difficult rather than easier.
So is one of the problems of modern cars, that they have just got too complicated, too heavy and we isolate the driver too much from the road?
I know that on bad days, I take the Lotus and enjoy that drive. Perhaps, if we all learned to enjoy driving, we’d do it better and have less accidents and breakdowns.
A Toupee for My Elan
I call it a toupee, but it’s just a very small cover from Classic Additions.
As you can see it could have been made for the Elan. It is a very good fit.
It was also very good value at £42 complete with a little bag to keep it in.
The only problem is that I have an old mobile phone aerial on the windscreen and this will probably poke through. I could remove the aerial but I do like the non-working period detail of an analogue phone. It’s hands-free to!
Do Elans Fade Away?
I took this picture of my Elan and a much later Elise. Both are in the same Norfolk Mustard.
A Yellow Elan and a Yellow Elise
Note how the colour is exactly the same and that my Elan has not faded in any way. Speaking to the guy who services my car, he said that yellows hardly seem to fade. I think it’s the pigment.
Two Original Elan Key Fobs and a Tool Kit
I belong to a forum on Lotus Elan Central, where we talk about Lotus Elans, as you might expect.
Someone mentioned getting a new key fob for Christmas. Here are my two.
Two Lotus Elan Key Fobs
Note that the one on the right has hardly been used and the badge has not shown any sign of wear, unlike the one on the left.
Here’s the toolkit for good measure.
A Pristine Lotus Elan Tool Kit
This has never been used. There is no rust at all.
But I do feel cheated in that some tool kits have a pen knife.
An Unusual Car Number Plate
I was in Cambridge yesterday and I saw one of the world’s worst cars, a Bentley something, with the number plate HAS 2 NOB. It is in fact HA5, but then the banker who owned it had made the plate illegal with unapproved spacing.
The main reason I call the Bentley one of the world’s worst cars, is that it only does about seventeen miles to the gallon. For lots of reasons, such as climate change and saving fossil fuels for future generations, cars that cannot do more than forty miles to the gallon should not be manufactured.
Now if you think this is jealousy, you couldn’t be further from the truth. If I wanted a Bentley, I could definitely afford one, but I certainly wouldn’t be seen dead in one!
I’ll stick to my Lotus, which incidentally weighs only forty percent of the Bentley. Just as in people, being obese is not a good thing.
I think it would be interesting to see how which car to lap Nurburgring fastest in the hands of the owner.
Farewell Saab
I’ve never owned a Saab, possibly because I have tended to buy British cars, but feel rather sad that General Motors have decided to pull the plug on a quintessential Swedish and European brand.
But it is only a gradual process, where cars splitting into mainstream and niches. Saab unfortunately couldn’t find a niche big enough to live in. Just like MG-Rover!
And just like MG-Rover, I doubt that they will be able to survive if someone else buys them. After all, their product line seems rather stale and it is in desperate need of new models.
An Elan on Skis?
I took the X-Type to Sainsburys this afternoon and the temperature gauge was showing minus eight. Don’t ask me what that is in old money, as I don’t do Fahrenheit.
It was probably lucky that I took the Jaguar as someone had got themselves stuck and needed a tow off the snow-covered grass. Not that the car would have been any good at it, as it wasn’t getting any grip on the ice, but I did have a tow rope, which meant that someone else in a Nissan Terrano could do the honours and remove the BMW.
Since the weather has got bad I’ve been alternating the two cars; the Jaguar X-Type and the Lotus Elan.
These pictures show the conditions and a couple of pictures to prove the Elan got safely to Newmarket and back.
By preference, I’d take the Elan every time on this sort of surface. Especially as the lane to the main road into Newmarket, hasn’t been gritted at all and is a fairly steep incline down and then up both ways. It’s also very much single track as the photo shows and you need to go slowly to avoid hitting someone going the other way, as hedges and a couple of bends make the road dangerous. In the last eighteen years, that I have lived in this house, I reckon that there have been about one serious accident a year. I’ve been hit thrice; by the postie, a lady who didn’t get over at all and a lunatic.
Today, I took the Lotus in with the top down and perhaps that was just too ambitious, despite the fact I was well wrapped up. What the car needs is a proper tonneau cover!
All of this shows, that if you take a modern car like the X-Type with lots of clever electronics and anti-lock braking, it is no better than a car which was designed with proper dynamics in the first place.
I should say that I’ve driven cars a lot worse on snow and ice than the Jaguar, but good dynamics are the key to everything, when it comes to roadholding on surfaces, that are good, bad or just plain terrible!
Limping There and Back
As I drove to get the boat at Harwich, the Lotus Elan developed a gearbox fault. What it meant was that I only had second, fourth and reverse gears.
I was faced with a dilemma, in that did I drive back home and get the Jaguar or did I continue. To complicate matters, I was also going to see Ipswich play Peterborough, so I’d miss the match, if I changed cars.
So I continued.
It now should be said, that the engine of the Lotus can drive the car happily in second and fourth, so without any mishaps, I managed to drive from Ipswich to Harwich carefully at about fifty-five. I had dreaded getting on the boat, as on some ferries, you have to drive up a steep ramp, but in this case it was almost level, as they weren’t using the upper decks at all. I only had a few kilometres to go on the other side, so it was a chance worth taking.
I did check in with a friendly forum called Lotus Elan Central and this identified the problem as a gear cable. So I didn’t need to get any serious help in Holland and just drove back to the boat last night.
It was then a quiet drive home through the villages on a getting-better-sort of Sunday. Weather wise that is.
The question that has to be asked is, how many performance cars could have limped home so successfully? As a point here, my 2.2 litre diesel Jaguar always needs to start in first, as it has nowhere near the power range of the Lotus.
The Anonymous Widower 