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Power Steering Loss Part I

Problems At The Track
Posted July 15 2008 07:38 AM by MilesSpeed 
Filed under: Hard Driving

There are a lot of bad things that can happen at the track, one of them is loss of the ability to control your vehicle.


A couple years back I had my Camaro at Laguna Seca and learned what it is like to have a mechanical failure. The Camaro had fought its battles with me before, but never on the race track. Coming into turn 3, the second turn past the straight, it noticed it extremely difficult to turn. This wasn’t because of the horrible understeer my car had, but because the power steering was no longer active. I thought maybe it was just a low fluid thing, or maybe a belt slipping. It wasn’t either of those things, the pump was locking up. At worse I thought I would be driving the rest of the day without power steering which wouldn’t be the first time. I drove my car for months with no power to the box, so a track day would be no problem. That would have been a breeze compared to what did end up happening. I returned to the course, with power steering. I thought, this is sweet! Must have been a fluke, I thought. Unfortunately, cars usually don’t just have flukes, they usually have failures and that is that. I did a couple laps before the power steering quit on me again, and it decided to quit half way through a turn, worse than that, a couple turns later, it came back on unexpectedly. Needless to say my trackday was ended early because it was not safe to be out there with intermittent steering.

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