13.04.2026 – Simulating Wheel Bearing Behaviour
Wheel bearings are an important component for race cars, more than it might be imagined and they indeed can easily be a race stopper if they fail.
Preload is an important parameter that can affect both the mileage of a wheel bearing and the performance of the car:
a too high preload increases the contact pressure on the sphere (which results into initial pitting and ultimately failure), and the rolling resistance (which dissipate energy from the Power Unit)
a too low preload, on the other side, can create a “hammering” effect because the spheres might loose contact on some portions of the reaceways and get suddenly back to contact on others (see the polar graphs in the picture here below; rolling resistance is clearly reduced, but the camber stiffness of the whole wheel group might drop below critical values
✅ There is an optimum working window of the preload, that is not straightforward achievable, even with the support from the bearing manufacturer
❗In fact knowing the behaviour of the components around the bearings (hub, upright) and their interaction with the bearing is paramount in finding the correct preload (and then achieving it in practice is a completely different story)
❗Simulating the bearing behavior is the way to go to and to help the bearing manufacturer to find the correct preload value
📌 In Chapter 17 of the book “Computational Structural Engineering” I am showing a method to model wheel bearings without the needing of modelling alle the spheres
