I’ve recently acquired a towbar mounted rack which looks very nice, strong etc. Its to attach to my Mitzu outlander, which due to the spare wheel is set up so the detachable ball comes out at an angle, but the ball is dead center. The rack therefore does not sit at right angles to the vehicle as it uses the neck to clamp to. It looks a little strange, bikes don;t foul the vehicle but the lights kinda point at about 20deg towards the verg. Is this still legal or am I going to have to point the lights back straight? I may do photos later if I get a chance and figure on how to post them.

We need photos but I assume the lights need to point backwards for fairly obvious reasons- Especially as it is your N/S right turn indicator the rear vehicle wont see

Are you sure that something is not just bent?

I thought the standards relating to towbars/balls mean that the ball is always vertical relative to the road?

ball is vertical to the road, but the neck of the bar is not at 90 deg to the bumper horizontally, so the rack does sit flat but points to the near side a bit.

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failed misserably to post photo, but if this works you can see what my issue is!

Cheers

Could you not remove the lights from the trailer board & then reposition/re-angle them to point directly backwards?

I had a similar issue a while back when we had a Freelander. The rack was probably about 10 deg off-centre.

Didn’t have any issues with it, but yours looks a bit more ‘skewed’.

I’ve been looking at re-aligning the lights, which shouldn’t be too much of an issue, just seeing if i could get away with it like this – but think I will make some changes – thanks all.

Gavin, thanks for posting photo btw, must teach myself how to do this sometime!