Forgeline Motorsports, the family-owned Dayton, Ohio-based manufacturer of racing and consumer specialty wheels has long wanted to enter the drag racing industry. It’s taken time to conceive and construct wheels that would withstand pressures of the most extreme form of motorsport.
The company, which has been producing wheels for professional road racing applications for more than 25 years, directed its vast experience toward straight-line racing and developed two examples of its latest technology, the all-forged Beadlock wheel.
Showing two examples as this year’s Performance Racing Industry (PRI) show, Forgeline debuted the GS1R Beadlock and CF1R Beadlock monoblock Single Beadlock wheels. Carved from one forging of 6061-T6 aluminum, using an advanced precision machining process, Forgeline duplicates its successful road-racing technology technology to drag racing.
The major difference between the wheels Forgeline manufactures for IMSA, SRO America, Trans Am and most amateur racing series in America lies in the inclusion of a special bolt-on Beadlock ring that, like the monoblock wheel itself, uses 6061-T6 aluminum.
The use of this forged aluminum ring holds the tire securely in place and limits unwanted tire slip against the wheel, thereby stopping the tire from becoming unseated while subjected to the high speeds and inherent vibrations of both the launch and the pass in drag racing.
These rear wheels also combat every racer’s nemesis of unsprung weight, coming in at about 17 pounds each. The integrity of a single-piece wheel provides for proper brake clearances on applications that use large-diameter disc brakes.
“This is a product that came about as an engineering challenge, in response to specific customer needs,” Forgeline president David Schardt explained. “More and more of our customers are using their sports cars for drag racing and mile- or half-mile racing events and, as they got more serious about it, many of them wanted to try a deadlock wheel.”
A lack of options on the market made the Schardt family considers their options, assisting customers with “true custom fitments and a higher performance level,” Schardt said. “Our engineering team decided that this was a solvable problem. We just had to sign down and come at it from a new perspective.”
Forgeline’s new one-piece forged monoblock GS1R Beadlock and CF1R Beadlock wheels, while being introduced during the PRI show, are available for custom order now and can be had in chrome or color applications. Using 17-inch diameters with widths ranging from 8.5 to 11 inches and in 18-inch diameters, in widths from 10-13 inches available now, Forgeline intends to offer 19-inch diameters in the spring of 2020.
Leave a Reply