Long story so bare with me. A guy I know brings his X5 in for the dreaded NCT about 2 weeks ago. Almost a clean bill of health except one thing, a rear suspension ball joint worn. Not too bad on a 12 year old jeep.

I replaced the offending ball joint and put all the eccentric bushes back exactly where they were. Not too bad of a job at all.

Fast forward to today and I get a call. Jeep failed again and the owner is none too happy on the phone. Turns out that it failed on the handbrake effort ( below 16%). After calling the manager out to find out what was going on, it turns out that the handbrake was never checked on the original test and now he is expected to pay for another retest.

My understanding is that if a car fails the test and is retested within 4 weeks (which it was),it's only tested on the failure points. No mention on the original fail sheet that it had failed on the handbrake or that the handbrake test was not accomplished.

My question is, if they find a problem with the rear suspension will they deliberately not do the handbrake force test for fear of an incorrect reading, or did the idiot doing the test just forget.