At the two places I talked to about the ball vs tapered roller bearings, they both said the normally sell the ball to street/strip and the tapered rollers to offroad trucks. I would think that the forces applied to the bearings on a good launch would be greater than rock climbing. Or as I'm writing it comes to mind that a lot of off road trucks also have big wheel spacers and the forces from that would be a lot.

As far as lateral forces, in a hard turn the outside wheel would take a lot more of the load on the tapered bearing that is *working* in the direction.

I was unaware of ball bearings making a comeback. Is this in street cars? Or race cars looking to loose 0.0001 of a second on the track?