Loosing a wheel at 60 on Central

[SilverCobra]

Cool morning and no rain the forecast, so I decided to drive the SilverCobra to work this morning, before the summer heat sets in & makes that commute ugly. Left the office around 6:00 p.m. and the gas gauge was empty and had left my cell phone at home. Nope - don't want to run out of gas & be stranded on Central in Friday rush hour, so hit the only gas station in downtown Dallas and chatted with the attendant about Cobras and cars.

Stopped at General Joe Chopstix at Mockingbird for take out for me and the Mrs. - headed back on Central for the 15 minute trip home. I had just gotten to cruising altitude at 60 mph when all of a sudden I felt a jolt - the rear end drop about 6 inches - and a rubbing/grinding noise. It took me about 2 seconds to figure out that I had lost my right rear wheel & could not figure out how I could loose a Compomotive that did not have a spinner.

Luckily, I was still in the right lane and made a slow stop after about 200 ft on the right shoulder with cars still whizzing by. Sure enough - the right rear wheel was off the axle at about 30 degrees and had nudged up in the wheel well. I feel very fortunate that the wheel did not catch or bust out the fiberglass wheel well - but there was not a scratch.

Another motorist saw my plight and stopped and let me borrower his cell phone to call Meadows thinking that he had a trailer - and said he would be there in 20 minutes. Before Tom could show up, a crusing flatbed tow truck showed up. The guy did not seem too smart or give me a lot of confidence in his ability to load a Cobra without damage, but he said he knew of another truck that could do it. The second guy had a longer bed on his truck and I could tell he knew what he was doing. The first truck had to pull into the right lane of traffic to act as a block to allow the the bigger truck to pull around and load the Cobra from the rear. We were able to lift the rear end of the car with the ramp to get the wheel reseated in the axle to at least winch it about 15 feet onto the ramp bed. With the first truck acting a blocker again, we made a u-turn back heading north and dropped it off at a Mobil station down from my house that is full of car guys. There was no way to get the crippled car down my alley and the 15 degee angle down the driveway into my garage. I am going back in the morning to work on it to see what went wrong.

Now looking back, that seems kinda scary. I'm glad I was only driving 60 miles per hour in a straight line instead of on a road course somewhere coming out of a turn for the back straight away. I don't know if anyone else has ever lost a wheel like this on a Jag IRS, but nothing that I would have expected.

Tom - thanks again for showing up buddy.