Flat towing or tow dolly: Crazy idea?

iceracer said:

If a farmer can back up a wagon,  why can't you back a dolly/car ?     

I can't get a potted plant to stay alive on my windowsill. Farmers can do a lot of things I cannot do.

Has anyone built their own tow dolly or flat tow setup?

iceracer said:

If a farmer can back up a wagon,  why can't you back a dolly/car ?     

Most car dollies don't articulate the same way that hay wagons do.  If you have a big enough tow vehicle (or a small enough towed vehicle) you can actually back up a car dolly but it's a rather brute force operation.

Snrub said:

Has anyone built their own tow dolly or flat tow setup?

HF has a flat tow setup for like $less than 100. I can't imagine building it much cheaper than that. It takes a bit of work to mount the bar to the vehicle being towed, but you'd have to do that anyway.

I've had mine for 10 plus years and have towed Jeep xj, Saab 9-3s, Fiat x1/9, and probably others that I'm forgetting. All with the same HF bar.

I have a tow dolly that I am thinking of selling.  It has new tires.  $650.00

Thread jack over...

So, just to put my question in perspective...

I’ve been living in in the city. Having a racecar is already a huge luxury. I have no space for a tow vehicle and proper trailer. So, I’ve been driving my racecar to events (it’s registered, plated, and insured). There are obvious issues with this approach!

I'm trying to find a way to tow the racecar behind my daily driver: a Mercedes W124 sedan. With the OEM hitch sold in Europe, they’re rated to tow over 3500 lbs. Since the racecar is closer to 2600 lbs, I thought maybe it wasn’t a crazy idea to rent a dolly from UHaul for the 2 (or possibly 3) race weekends I’ll do this summer. 

Uhaul probably won't let you (go on their website and put in your tow vehicle, even lying about the vehicle you are towing I'm not sure they will deem the w124 big enough), but I think it's a fine idea.

Tow bar will give you even a bit of overhead for tires, gas, cooler, tent, etc.

And the tow bar can stow inside the racecar when you aren't using it.

In reply to LanEvo :

They may not rent it to you if you're not towing with a truck.

Granted, it's worth a shot.  IMO, flat towing or dolly towing both require a mobile car, and at that point you may as well just drive the car.

Snrub said:

Has anyone built their own tow dolly or flat tow setup?

Both. Used the dolly to tow my challenge car to Florida and back, and to Maxton a few times. Sold it with a race car and built my second dedicated tow bar after that. If it's only used for one application you can set it up to bolt or clip on in seconds

My brother and I flat towed a 240z behind a pickup from Vancouver to Ottawa about 30 years ago...    And I’ve used a tow dolly numerous times to bring a project home (most recently about 3 weeks ago). 

A tow bar would be the most convenient from the home storage perspective and also likely the easier option to acquire (local RV shop?) but it will probably require some brackets be fabricated for the front of the race car (or maybe you could use the front bumper mount points?).

Gordon

Edit.... Robbie covered where to buy a tow bar... sorry I missed that...

You know what would be nice?  If Harbor Freight sold the towed-car side tow bar brackets separately.  What if you have two or three or five cars you want to tow?  What then?

Yeah, I said flat towing sucks, but I done did it before, and I'll probably do it again, too.

I flat towed my Formula Vee; used those lights on long cables like tow trucks have. The magnetic base for the lights allowed me to just stick the lights on the Vee frame rails. Note Nevada was / is pretty liberal with some things. I did have to take the nose of the Vee of course.

If you only need to tow 2 or 3 times, just rent a truck and trailer and call it a day.

docwyte said:

If you only need to tow 2 or 3 times, just rent a truck and trailer and call it a day.

Gets very expensive for longish distances, since you have to pay by the mile at $1 per. The trailer is cheap ... if you can find one (they’re always out of stock at UHaul). But the truck gets expensive if the event requires an 800-900 mile round trip.

The last time I checked with UHaul, they wouldn’t rent a pickup or van for towing, so you had to go with a 10’ box truck at minimum. For a 4-day weekend, that comes out to $1200-1300 for equipment and mileage. That compares to something like $50 per day for a dolly if you use your own car.

This guy flat towed coast to coast. 

Robbie said:

iceracer said:

If a farmer can back up a wagon,  why can't you back a dolly/car ?     

I can't get a potted plant to stay alive on my windowsill. Farmers can do a lot of things I cannot do.

I can barely back up a regular trailer...

After many tows on trailers, dollies, and flat-tow setups, here's how it panned out for me:

Trailers are not the easy button.  Watch how much time it takes other guys in the paddock to hook up, load, and tie down the car.

"Just rent a trailer and a truck" costs a few hundred bucks for a weekend and the pickup and drop-off time is a chunk.  Plus you need another driver because you can't leave your car at the rental place for the weekend.  If I were a single guy or retired, I might have time for all that, but really I don't now.

UHaul trailers tow like ass.  They require me to put the car all the way at the front of the trailer, so I can't balance the load, and the tongue weight is way too high for anything but a serious pickup, or a Disco with air bags.  And they weigh a lot.  I've towed them several times with a Jeep GC Laredo and it was sketch as hell.

A dolly will eliminate the tongue weight and the need for another driver but still costs $200 and has to be picked up and dropped off.  If the car is FWD they're pretty easy to load-n-go.  I can back one up empty but not loaded.

UHaul tow dollies don't have surge brakes and they weigh a fair bit, so they are harder to tow safely than a flat tow where I don't have the dolly weight to brake.

For RWD cars, dolly tow and flat tow both pose the issue of whether to disconnect the driveshaft.  As far as I know, manual transmissions all take some of their lubrication from splashing by the input shaft, which won't happen with the car in neutral.  Whether that's fatal to the tranny or not is hard to figure out.

My experience with a Getrag 260 has been I can tow in neutral for 1.5 hours on the highway without immediately-apparent damage.  That's good, because the E30s and E21s have two-piece driveshafts, and I have never been able to disconnect the shaft from the differential without dropping the center bearing, and I have never been able to drop the center bearing without dropping the exhaust.

In order to find out whether the Getrag could take it, I had to risk burning it up.  Now I have the same problem with another car running a T5.  Thus far I have been spending 15 minutes to disconnect or reconnect the driveshaft (T5 has a slip yoke so the exhaust can stay put) because I don't have the time to do a transmission swap if it goes wrong.  But man is it a drag on rainy days.

Most states don't require the toad to be registered, but they do require magnetic tow lights.  I had to find a drop hitch that got low enough to keep the tow bars parallel to the ground; sloping up to the hitch is risky because it can pop the hitch off the ball in a hard stop and put the toad under the tow vehicle.  No way to back the rig up.  Otherwise it's the easiest, most stable tow setup to haul with, except during tighter turns when I need to slow down a good bit.  Obviously, if I didn't have a way to tow without the steering lock engaged, it would be nightmarish.

The generic tow bar to have is the Smittybuilt.  Reese and the others are too lightweight and wear out in a summer.  Using a generic meant I had to fab up something for secure attachments to the toad chassis, and that took time plus a fair amount of steel and welding.  If there had been something specifically for the chassis from Blue Ox or one of the other RV towing outfits, that would've cost a lot more but been a lot easier.

All in all, towing is only something I mess with if it's the only way I can get to the track with all the stuff I need.   I'm sure I would feel differently if I had an F-250 and an enclosed trailer, but that's just not gonna happen.  When I can manage to drive to the track, I'm grateful (it's the best feature of the E92 M3 if you ask me).  If I break it and I need a tow home, then I'll join AAA Plus on my cell phone for $105, and then call them 20 minutes later for my first "free" 100-mile tow.  For $136, AAA Premiere is available with "free" 200-mile tows.

Some states require anything with wheels on the ground to be registered.

Professor_Brap said:

Im a tow dolly man myself. 

Great shot of the strip mall at the corner of 256 and Tussing as well

In reply to GCrites80s :

Thank you! We met at the Chase there to swap moneys and title. 

In reply to JBasham :

That's basically where I’m at as well. Owning a trailer and tow rig makes no sense for me. Renting is almost as much hassle (and not even all that much cheaper). 

So, I’ve just been loading a set of race tires in the back of my racecar and driving it to race weekends. Been lucky so far, but I feel like I’m pushing it. 

In reply to LanEvo :

If you're within 100 or 200 miles, AAA Plus or Premiere will get you and your car home for no extra charge.  And you really can wait until you need it, join them & pay the fee with a credit card, and then call back in 15 or 20 minutes and order the tow.

I drove to the track when I ran a showroom stock Miata, my house was only 9 miles away. This was really good when the high mileage motor did a rod bearing in. 

I do know of one competitor who towed a small 4 x 6 trailer with all his stuff and a small motorcycle (I think it was a Ninja 250). The motorcycle was his safety net in case he needed to go to the parts store or needed to ride the 250 miles home and come back with truck and trailer. 

It is easier when you have another vehicle that can tow, it's easier to find a place to store a trailer rather than a truck and trailer. I don't envy folks who live in big cities.

I've dolly towed and flat towed to the Challenge from Texas, so 1100+ miles each way. 

I prefer flat-towing overall. Both have issues. I feel flat towing has less, but it requires you to create some good attachment points for the tow bar. It is way more work the first time, and easier every time after that. Actually, the time i towed to the Challenge with a dolley, i had done the tow bar but had issues with the way the car towed and no time to fix it, so i flat-towed. It was just an alignment issue. Raced the car with E36 M3 alignment and still beat the then-new miata in autocross, but couldn't flat tow sadly. 

Noone is suggesting this, but whatever you do, don't tow a RWD backwards with the front wheels on the ground. It's super crappy. I'm pretty sure that the only reason why wheel-lift tow trucks get away with it is that they lift the back of the car so high that they effectively reverse the caster angle in the front suspension. Not really an option with racecar levels of caster and front bumper/splitter clearance. 

THANK YOU for connecting those dots in my feeble brain.  I had always heard never to put a RWD car on a tow dolly backwards, but I couldn't picture what the problem would be if I got the steering strapped dead center.  Not that I would've experimented on my own.