Ouch!

 

Hmm...drawing conclusions without real knowlege...what's the word for people who do that?....oh, yeah...HACK.

 

I know a guy that has cracked more than one HRE wheel at track events.

 

 

I"m not surprised that the bling wheels fall apart at the track, but the problems with Kinesis and Fikse are very surprising. Personally, I'll stick with OEM/ BBS or Ruf wheels on my car.
Who makes the Ruf wheels? I bet they are a quality piece or Ruf wouldn't use them.

 

Who makes the Ruf wheels?

I know that OZ makes some of them. And as we know, they are heavy. This may help explain why.

 

Yep,heavy as hell! But,WTF I can live with heavy wheels! Agree?


cheers

R

Hey,am I going to see you in Nevada soon?

 

Hey, we have cracked both rear Fikse (18 x 12.5's) FM10's at the same time. Got to admit, they didn't look like the above pic. Those breaks look like cast ......... not forged.

 

Chad...have you had your Fikse crack in the center section or the outer rim?

 

anyone ever try using CCWs??

 

So they did in the past... which groups/orgs/races did they supply with any amount of success? Duration?

 

does it really matter.

 

Here’s my .02 which I’m sure some won’t agree or like it but, it’s just my point of view from being around the race track more than twenty years.

If PCA is actually considering Banning HRE wheels I’d really like to see the reason. Would it be from this one incident? I think the bench mark for racing wheels is likely BBS and I can’t begin to count the number of those I’ve seen cracked and broken over the years. In fact I believe BBS is even no longer offering their racing centers in the Aluminum/Magnesium blend the used for years do to the fact they’ve had so many problems with their wheels cracking with so few hours of racing. In 87 or 88 when I was driving at 24 hours of Daytona I had a left rear Ronal completely break like the wheel in the photo, it actually came off in a right hand turn in the infield and went under the car and I bounced over it with no warning but, that got my attention. The Ronal’s were 3 piece German made and only about 6 races old. When we got back to the pits we checked all the others and found 5 more of our 16 wheels were starting to crack! We learned the hard way to check our wheels every day at the race track from that point on. Don’t think for a minute that BBS, Fikse, OZ’s or any others you can think of don’t break because they all will at some point unless we do what NASCAR does and all go to Steel wheels (wouldn’t that be swell).

The wheel in the photo is a Kinesis but, I can tell you first hand they are a very serious Company when it comes to the strength and safety of their wheels. This is one of the reasons you don’t see them producing 50 different looking centers. When they design a wheel it is first done on CAD/CAM/CAE software which has the ability to do FEA (finite element analysis) which is complete stress analysis for the particular material. Then they physically build the design and send it to a wheel testing facility that does fatigue testing which cycles the wheel and stresses it until it actually breaks. Then a complete analysis is written on the results. This is not only time consuming but rather expensive. Most all of the larger wheel manufactures do testing similar to this so, the data and the research has been done. I don’t know what happened on the wheel in the photo and it’s really a shame but if nothing else I think everyone reading this thread should learn something rather than pointing fingers. If you like going to the track hopefully you’ll check your wheels for cracking more often now. Because it does and will eventually happen to all of us if we aren’t paying attention.

I can tell you that after 911 Design in Claremont had more than 25 BBS centers crack in less than a year and a half he now for the past 5 years only recommends Kinesis wheels to his customers. He had told me that he now almost NEVER sees wheels crack anymore. They service more than 50 track cars and usually take from 8 to 15 cars to each event. From that one example I think you can say Kinesis last longer than BBS … and I’m a huge fan of BBS … just look at my picture next to my name (that’s my street car)

What I’m trying to say is don’t draw conclusions too quickly without doing the homework. I think it’s not the norm for a wheel to break that quickly and you can bet Kinesis is all over this but, these wheels are clearly not junk!

 

Thanks Cary. Really good to have input from someone in racing--as opposed to "bench racing".

Hope you're up to no good, and having fun. Tyson and I had lunch and were singing your praises this week.

Dave

 

Great post Cary. Your comments definately put the proper perspective on this issue in my opinion.

Mike