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Published on 17 April 2017

Another example of racing improving the breed was with my Morgan +4. In 1963 quite a few production sports cars used in competition were breaking stub axles. I had the right hand front wheel bearings collapse in practice for a race at Oran Park. Back home, we went through 23 hacksaw blades, in those days before grinders being readily available, getting the outer carrier off the stub axle, as it had been shrunk in the collapse, & would have destroyed the thread if we had pulled off without splitting it. Did the race meeting, but driving home the bearing was really howling. Testing found that stub axle was bent, but bent DOWNWARDS. We figured out the force inward at the bottom of the outside wheel cornering with the improved grip of radial tyres was flexing the stub downward. A lot of this flexing & the stub would fatigue & break. We had one break on a mates MG A when pushing it onto a trailer after a Bathurst meeting, & a Morgan had one break coming off a trailer at home. I had had mine take a permanent bend before cracking caused a failure. We grafted Ford Falcon stub axles onto the Morgan sliding stub carrier, & notified Morgan of the problem. It transpired they were also having a cracking problem in the UK, & 3 months later produced a replacement of stronger design. The suspension had been fine, until the improvement in tyres highlighted the weakness. The Morgan suspension gave positive camber with body roll. We had eliminated the body roll, which probably also increased the load on the outside stub. See the inside wheel off the track in the photo. Posting the photo in the E Type thread reminded me of this.