Rear Control Arms

[steboarder]

A day after buying myself an S3 I came close to almost certain death, with great thanks to the rear control arm shearing in half.

The back right, lower control arm simply sheared across the forked end leaving my wheel, brakes, drive shaft etc. to basically go wherever they wanted.

The forked arm had sheared in 2 places and I could see after taking it off that one side of the fork had been sheared for quite some time. This means I had been driving my car back the hour and a half from where I bought it with the control arm only clinging on by the skin of its teeth. Thankfully it dropped off in my works car park at 5mph and not on the A1 at 105mph - erm i mean 70mph.

Just a warning to you all that if this happens, it drags all your rear driveshaft out of the back transmition (thats the oil on the floor in the photos) bends the anti roll bar, and at speed would cause a huge accident.

If you have your rear wheels off for any reason i would advise to clean the control arms up and look for any sort of damage, cracks, weak spots, as i would hate this to happen to anyone whilst driving.

A quick search on google shows that this is actually quite common in Europe and there are now re-engineered stronger ones for sale.

Cheers