[richwalsh]

**Help Needed – Mysterious Vibration After Repairs**

Hey everyone,

I’d really appreciate any advice or suggestions on an issue I’ve been dealing with.

About two months ago, I was driving on a country road in Oxfordshire late at night when I hit two dislodged curb stones in the middle of the road. The impact caused significant damage—snapped my front left wishbone, broke the spring and damper, cracked a couple of wheels, and damaged several tyres.

After spending £2,000 on repairs at my trusted local garage (who I’ve used for 15 years), there’s one lingering problem:

On the motorway, I’m experiencing a rhythmic vibration that’s very noticeable at **60 mph**. It gets worse when I turn right but **completely disappears when I turn left**.

We’ve checked and rechecked:
✅ Wheel balancing
✅ Brand new tyres
✅ No obvious damage to other components

My mechanic is stumped, and so am I. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could it be a driveshaft, a hub issue, or something else entirely?

Any input would be hugely appreciated—this is driving me mad!

Thanks in advance.

[gaseosx]

RPM based
Disappears on turning left
Rythmic

Front wheel bearing, probably left going by damage?

[DrFerry]

Originally Posted by richwalsh

**Help Needed – Mysterious Vibration After Repairs**
Hey everyone, I’d really appreciate any advice or suggestions on an issue I’ve been dealing with. About two months ago, I was driving on a country road in Oxfordshire late at night when I hit two dislodged curb stones in the middle of the road. The impact caused significant damage—snapped my front left wishbone, broke the spring and damper, cracked a couple of wheels, and damaged several tyres. After spending £2,000 on repairs at my trusted local garage (who I’ve used for 15 years), there’s one lingering problem: On the motorway, I’m experiencing a rhythmic vibration that’s very noticeable at **60 mph**. It gets worse when I turn right but **completely disappears when I turn left**.

We’ve checked and rechecked:
✅ Wheel balancing
✅ Brand new tyres
✅ No obvious damage to other components

My mechanic is stumped, and so am I. Has anyone experienced something similar? Could it be a driveshaft, a hub issue, or something else entirely? Any input would be hugely appreciated—this is driving me mad! Thanks in advance.

Take a good look at the engine mounts. On the E9X M3, bad or broken engine mounts cause the engine to sit up to one inch lower in the engine bay. Consequently, the oil pan (sump) can touch the sump guard, steering rack and anti roll bar (if I recall correctly). It's possible the same thing could be happening on your 2013 F body 4 series. There are other threads out there on the E9X m3 forum about the issue. Vibration (and or noise) when turning in one direction is typically thought to be a wheel bearing BUT you are also mentioning a rhythmical resonance type vibration which suggests engine mounts to me. When were they last replaced? They have a service life or about 65K miles on an E9X M3 - or less with use of launch control.

[Tejas1836]

Wow

[MaxVO2]

***Wow, with such a hard hit and some bent/broken components there is still a lot that could be off and causing the harmonics/vibration even after replacing bent/broken components.

An alignment can certainly have the vehicle tracking straight but with such a hard hit I would have a frame/body guy with knowledge check the car itself for squareness - the mounts (perches) the dampeners and other components bolt on to could have been damaged and literally lifted them out of square of the rest of the chassis, or cracked bushings/spherical bearings in other parts of the car from such a hard hit.

A wheel alignment and proper balancing of the tires can still mask an alignment or bent/out of square perch, or motor mount damage that only manifests itself at a particular speed that causes the vibration.

A static alignment is certainly helpful on the assumption the car itself is properly "squared" in all three dimensions. It takes a pretty experienced body/frame person to know what to look for and specialized frame/unibody frame alignment tools to fix. Any hit of that magnitude with a right vs left turn difference in vibration leads me to believe it is more than just a replacing components type of fix.

Get the vehicle to an experienced frame/body guy if your mechanic is not familiar with the measurements or doesn't have the tooling to do the proper assessment/checks for stress/impact/impulse induced frame/body damage.

£2,000 cost for that repair seems *very* low to me given what you describe had to be replaced. Tires/wheels, the wishbone, etc.. Those are not inexpensive parts so not much left to cover the significant time needed to assess and correct unibody/frame issues.

Good luck and hope this helps a bit.

[T.R.S.]

Originally Posted by gaseosx

Front wheel bearing, probably left going by damage?

Left front wheel bearing is what immediately came to my mind, too. Considering all the other damage that occurred on that corner, it's hard to believe there was absolutely no damage done to it. It had to have been at least tweaked pretty good by the impact.

[B58 parts]

I'm going to go with preload on the sway bar. I had fits with it on f30 and E36 after messing with the suspension. Vibration at 40mph worse turning the direction into the preload. Both sides, 56nm, normal position.

[richwalsh]

Thanks for all the advice! Just to clarify, the wheels and tires weren’t included in the £2,000 repair cost—that was an additional expense. Sorry, I should have mentioned that earlier. I’ll be passing all of your suggestions on to my mechanic this morning. Really appreciate the help!