My wife and I were wheeling in Death Valley last weekend. We did some moderately bumpy stuff but nothing out of the ordinary. All was well until we managed to cut a 4 inch gash in the right front tire's sidewall. Not exactly sure when that happened, we might have driven on it flat for as much as 15 minutes on a fairly rough trail before we noticed it. Changed the tire without incident and went on to finish the trail (South Park Canyon and the infamous Chicken Rock: piece of cake :-) When we got back to the bottom we switched to 4H from 4Lo and turned onto a nice wide smooth road. And all heck broke loose: the ESC light came on, the Jeep pulled severely to one side and make a big noise like the ABS was activating. And the steering wheel was 45 degrees off center. I was able to drive straight but any slight turn to the left activated the ESC making it pretty tricky to stay on the road. Had I been in "civilization" I would have called AAA and had it towed. But as we were at that point more than 60 miles from anywhere we had little choice but to continue. I decided to just drive in 4Lo the whole way. That worked fine for 20 or 30 miles of trail that was more or less 4Lo territory anyway. After that I tried 4Hi again and, oddly, it seemed to be better. I could now make turns more or less without incident though the light was now on continuously. (I'm guessing at that point it was indicating that the ESC system was in a failure mode rather than activated.) Got to the hotel without further incident. The next morning I read the ProjectJK article about centering the steering wheel and decided to give that a try. I had never done any suspension adjustments before but this one really is as easy as the article says. 5 minutes, tops. Having no just one more day in DV, worrying about the ESC "failure" and no spare we decided to just do easy stuff before heading home. Then the ESC light decided to go out completely as if it was operating normally again. We did our easy trail (Titus Canyon, pretty but no challenge for a Jeep) and drove 400 miles home on the highway with no problems.

The 4x4 store that originally sold me the tires replaced the damaged one under warranty and checked my alignment (by test driving only, no alignment machine). They said "no problem".

But now I'm really confused. Why was my steering wheel off center when there was no other issue? I'm reasonably sure that the drag link adjuster had not moved: the bolts were tight and the threads didn't look like they had ever moved. I couldn't see any damage to the tire rod or the drag link. How else does the steering get off-center?

 

Yikes, that sounds pretty scary. From what I've read a ESC activating properly with give you a flashing ESC light. If it is steady it means a malfunction. A couple other indicators work the same, flashing is active while constant on is a malfunction. The malfunction can lock up a brake but I don't know what your steering alignment problem would be. Hope you get an answer.

 

And why was it pulling radically to one side for a while but then went back to normal?

 

I had mine kick on once while I was driving down the road in 2 wheel high, not even turning. The light went on, acted oddly for about 50 yards and then went back to driving normal. Light stayed on for about 3 key cycles and then went off. Never had an issue since. One of the wheel speed sensors may have simply taken a nap for a few seconds.

I'm guessing the wheeling knocked something around a little and confused the system. The steering wheel may have been hard to one side because the other wheel had it's brakes locked up or maybe something goofy like the locking hubs only locking on one side. I doubt you'll have it come up again, but that's one more reason to try to always wheel in a group. You might want to put it up on stands and remove the wheels so you can check everything out properly. My first thought was your trackbar mount had ripped off since it's been known to happen. But that would have been very obvious.