Titan 7's Approach to Building a Racing Wheel: No Corners Cut

Racing wheels are subjected to severe and specific forces on a regular basis. When designing their motorsports-oriented wheels, Titan 7 takes clubbing curbs, dropping wheels off track, rubbing against other wheels and other forms of racing-related abuse into consideration.

Though this is a relatively short list of demands when compared to considerations one must make when designing a road-oriented wheel, they must live up to exacting standards their less-stressed siblings don’t have to. In other words, the increased loading and concentrated forces acting on them mean these wheels need to be built to an unusually high standard.

To attain the necessary sturdiness, Titan 7 puts their forged wheels through a grueling testing procedure which assesses corner fatigue, radial fatigue, drum endurance, and resistance to impacting.

Let’s delve into one of these to illustrate how seriously Titan 7 pursues safety. Impact testing replicates situations most wheels will run into on a regular basis. In this test, Titan 7 drop a giant guillotine-like device set to a specific height and weight onto the wheel to simulate hitting potholes, nudging curbs, and other forms of real-world abuse.

The robustness of their forged wheels wouldn’t be possible without the right foundation. Each wheel begins as a solid cylinder of aircraft-grade 6061 aluminum. They pressurize the cylinder with 10,000 tons of pressure to give the wheel its basic shape while improving the grain structure and overall properties of the high grade aluminum.

This means that porosity, a critical factor in track-oriented wheels, is minimized in the case of flow-formed wheels, and completely negated with forged wheels. Minimizing or negating porosity is crucial—a tiny air bubble or two may become the epicenter of a serious crack after plenty of curb hopping and weight shifting. In the case of the forged wheel, having no porosity and a densely organized microstructure allows for amazing designs, weight, and strength.

All of Titan 7’s wheels feature knurling on the inside of the bead to better grasp the tire.

Consistency in handling is dependent on a few factors—stiffness is one of them. Improving stiffness is key because it reduces wheel deflection / deformation in high load situations, which improves vehicle predictability, which increases driver confidence.

As big of a role as stiffness plays, Weight is one of the more crucial elements in a racing car as unsprung mass—too much of it—seriously handicaps roadholding and consistency with the contact patch.

Titan 7 put a great deal of importance on this aspect and works to trim as much material as possible while keeping material in critical areas to ensure complete safety and reliability.

For instance, TItan 7 decided that machining out the pockets on the back pad of wheels was worth the additional cost. Any safely removed mass means a performance improvement.

Weight reduction cannot be the only objective, though. As with anything that’s intended for such demanding use, its design must balance this against a few other aims. Therefore, it was decided that additional mass should be used around the inner rim flange to better absorb impacts and resist bending. Even if this added to the weight of the wheel, it helped ensure the sturdiness a track-oriented piece of hardware should have.

It’s not one area of performance which is prioritized with Titan 7’s forged wheels. They look at the big picture.