Wheel Tester

While most people ignore it, there’s still pretty common knowledge that tires are the most important part you can throw at a car. And it makes sense because the rubber on your wheels is all that keeps a car on the road. But if tires are so important, then it would mean that the wheels they are mounted on play almost as important of a role in vehicle performance, right?

Most tuners pick wheels for looks and by reputation. Racers swear that lighter wheels will enhance performance, but no one seems to know by just how much. So we took it upon ourselves to do a performance wheel test by rounding up five different makes of wheels and running them through a gamut of our home-brewed tests. Each wheel came in the identical 18x8.5-inch size with a +30et offset (a conservative size for our EVO 9 test car) and was shod in identical brand-new 255/35/18 BFGoodrich g-Force Sport spec tires.

Our test wasn’t about which brand of wheels is necessarily best. More important was the real-world performance difference, if any, between wheels manufactured by different methods, and how much bang you get for your buck. So we picked five different types of aluminum wheels—cast and forged, single or multi-piece—to put to the test. Each wheel is JWL certified and at least passes the basic JWL strength and durability tests for safety. We intentionally picked products that span the entire market of reputable aluminum wheels. This way, we’d be able to see the extent of difference as each wheel is put through our real-world tests.

5Zigen FNO1R-C
Whether in grassroots racing, drifting or professional time attack here or in Asia, 5Zigen’s FN01R-C line has proved to be one of the most popular and capable cast wheels to be found at the track. Although the wheel is gravity-cast like most entry-level street wheels, 5Zigen’s emphasis is on racing, robust construction, reasonable weight and cost, making this a great example of an affordable, high-quality, gravity-cast wheel. The engineers at 5Zigen designed and tested this wheel at the track and used computer-aided tools to optimize the strength characteristics of this traditional five-spoke design while minimizing unnecessary weight. These wheels are manufactured by pouring closely controlled molten aluminum alloys into a polished multi-piece steel mold, which minimizes the amount of machining necessary after casting.

AME TM02
Manufactured by Enkei, the AME TM02 is AME’s first track-oriented wheel sold in the U.S. The single-piece wheel uses Enkei’s patented MAT (Most Advanced Technology) that combines conventional casting and flow-forming forging in its construction. The wheel starts off as a gravity die-cast wheel (using AC 4 CH aluminum material) with the hoop structure cast narrow and with thicker material. The flow-forming forging process takes the heat-treated cast wheel and then extrudes and draws out the hoop to its final width and profile as the wheel is spinning. Flow forming not only extrudes the wheel hoop to its final shape, but also forges the wheel hoop section by compacting the original cast-aluminum crystal structure to become more dense and rigid, without creating breaks in the crystalline grain structure (which causes brittleness).

The cross-sectional profile that is drawn out is designed to optimize strength while reducing material and weight. This hybrid forging technique helps keeps this wheel’s price down. While other forged wheels also use a type of spinning extrusion process to flow forming the wheel hoop, Enkei claims that its process is differentiated by the combination of heat treatments, alloys and hoop profile. Above all else, Enkei/AME’s goal is to provide a high-quality wheel using efficient and cost-effective processes that are almost completely free from manufacturer defects with a very low defect rate.

AXIS Halo
As one of the premier sport compact wheel manufacturers spawned stateside, AXIS wheels has been around since the beginning. That means the company also has a lot of experience in making street tuner wheels that are stylish and long-lasting. The Halo is one of AXIS’ more recent wheel lines that was designed with street performance in mind. This means more spokes, less excess weight and no lip—all in a gravity-cast package. While not track tested during development, the Halo is a good reflection of a conventional gravity-cast wheel that most entry-level consumers would be looking at.