The Performance

Wheel Has

Been Reinvented

L

IGHTER WHEELS ARE FASTER WHEELS.

And after decades of incremental advance-

ments in wheel casting and forging

technology, additive manufacturing (3D

printing) is primed to transform how little

performance wheels can weigh and what

the wheels look like.

An early example of what we can expect was pro-

duced in 2019 by wheel-building boutique HRE in

collaboration with GE Additive, GE’s 3D printing

subsidiary. Their HRE3D+ wheels mated printed

titanium components with a carbon-fiber bar-

rel. The 20" x 9" front and 21" x 12.5" rear wheels

weighed just 16 and 19 pounds, respectively. For

high-end wheels of the same size, this saves roughly

a pound in the front and two pounds in the rear.

Traditional wheels are manufactured using cast

or forged aluminum alloys. These existing pro-

cesses are cost-effective but suffer from material

inefficiencies where extra meat is left on the wheels

to give the manufacturer margin for error in meet-

ing strength standards.

Casting’s standard process, gravity casting, is the

simplest and cheapest: molten aluminum is poured

into a mold and left to cure. Because the aluminum

casting process suffers from porosity—which cre-

3D-printed

HRE3D+ wheels,

fitted to a 2019

Ford GT.

14 November/December 2021

COURTESY HRE

C a r s &

(^4) Trucks
// B Y M A T T C R I S A R A //