Wheel Technology

Design philosophy

We are enthusiasts like you. We build, own, drive and race cars too. From rough beater daily drivers, to $120K national championship winning race cars. We understand what is important for both the pro and amateur. Specific features that make your car work better and facilitate your success in competition. Our experience both in casual HPDE and high level motorsports has given us insights in how to go beyond existing industry norms and standards with features like our dual valve, knurled bead and higher load ratings. But we don’t neglect the inspiration factor. No matter how strong, affordable and functional wheel might be, if it is boring to look at, they will sit unused.

Real world design language

The most efficient form for a race wheel ends up being an organic looking mesh structure that looks like the webbing inside a bone. Many small spokes and branches like a cross between a bicycle wheel and tree branch. Unfortunately, such a shape is really hard to make, impossible to clean and well, ugly. These spoke shapes are what AI will come up with if we let our fancy software optimize purely for strength targets and minimal mass. The good thing is we can then learn from these shapes an incorporate various features in a much more user friendly, easier to manufacture and hopefully, prettier design.

Function first

Our basic approach is to start with a big brake template that we need the wheel to clear. We may make a 3D scan of the brake and wheel well to determine the envelope we have to work with. Next comes fatigue life targets. FOS “Factor Of Safety” refers to how much stronger a structure is than the minimum required strength. Strength in this case is load x duty cycle. How big a hammer and how many times you hit it. We aim for an FOS of 4 at 10% above industry standard load. So if the DOT/JWL standard is say, 690kg at 250k cycles, we bump that load 10% (760kg) and test for 1M cycles. Once we have reached our strength targets, we work to optimize weight by reshaping and reducing mass where we can without affecting strength. But the starting point is always strength and fitment. The final weight is the product of those two.

How light?

Weight matters. But not as much as stiffness. The reason most buyers ask about weight first is that its the only quantifiable value that most companies offer. No brand offers a stiffness index.  Like shopping for professional services, most of us have idea how to differentiate one lawyer, doctor, real estate agent, plumber from another. So we ask for a referral from a friend because there are no other metrics. When it comes to wheels, we have style, fitment, price and weight usually. No other metrics. But what if we added stiffness as a metric to choose wheels for your project? Well, we will do just that, because we are different. In the near future, we will publish data from the stiffness studies of both our wheels and wheels from other brands. This data will show how stiffness directly affects steering response, grip and tire wear.

Everything else being equal, a stiff wheel that weighs 10% more will drive better and be faster on a race track than a lighter wheel that flexes 10% more. In practice, we can engineer a wheel to gain more percentage of stiffness than it gains in weight. A simple gusset here, chamfer there, a tweak in radii rewards us with big gains in stiffness and fatigue life with only a minor weight increase. The result is a light weight, purpose built, high performance wheel that we can offer a lifetime warranty on.

Gen 5: Sanger  6UL  Coto  2022+

Gen 5 wheels can be identified by the flat, flush center cap. They also have chamfered spokes (beveled edges) and ball mill (grooves in sides of spokes.

• 10% higher load ratings than JWL/DOT standards. This is proven to reduce fatigue cracks to zero even with competition style driving. A feature we were first to bring to market in 2015 with our 15×10. This effective approach has since been adopted by other wheel companies.
• Benchmark stiffness and fatigue life against the best wheels in the industry. We accomplish this by obtaining other brands wheels, 3D scanning, creating CAD models, simulating loads in FEA then physically testing the wheels in a US Lab. We know how strong the best are so we match or exceed those values.
• Knurled beads. The feature we first brought to aftermarket sports car wheels in 2009. Then an industry first and now widely adopted by other brands.
• Our proprietary 180° opposed dual valves for nitrogen/ dry air purging
• Flow forming barrels. This allows greater bending resistance, improved fatigue life and reduced weight.
• Valves set behind outer flange. This prevents the valve being damaged in wheel to wheel racing or even an accidental curb scuff.
• Proprietary Anvil rear flange design for increased resistance to bends from potholes and trackside excursions
• Lifetime warranty.