Not really specific to Aston Martin, but I suppose these babies could help with the lazy revs issue, or help my V12V rev even more quickly. These wheels are by Koenigsegg and were revealed at the Geneva Motor Show.

According to Jalopnik, these CF wheels "cut 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of unsprung weight without sacrificing strength" () and I'm guessing the previous wheels on the car weren't all that heavy to begin with. The only metal used on the wheels is in the valve stem and the decorative caps. Of course, these guys are probably not cheap!

 

A few of the Noble owners had Dymag wheels made a few years ago. They are a carbon composite wheel that many of them use for daily driving and track. I was surprised to see how well they held up.

 

Yeah, I've seen other wheels with CF rims (and alloy hubs), but assumed that they would not last long. Interested to see when aftermarket manufacturers start making wheels like these, and how much they'll cost.

 

Well, considering a set of Dymags is around $10K, and all they have is a simple CF ring, you have to think that a set of 100% CF wheels would probably be $20K. And that's for a large enough production base. Wouldn't surprise me if a one-off set cost $100K.

 

Dymag went bankrupt because their first batch of CF wheels were severely flawed, all the replacements caused them to go into bankrupcy. Hopefully they can come out of it.

If mass reduction is what you want the best place to start on the V8s is lightweight brake rotors (v12s do not have this option bc they already have carbon rotors)

 

Yep, big dollars. I personally can't see spending more than $10k on wheels.

No argument that lighter rotors is a good idea, but these wheels provide some pretty huge reduction in rotational mass, and a lot of the mass is pretty far out from the hub. The cost, however, is the problem.

 

Racer,

there is no denying they would help, but again at nearly 3-5x the cost of rotors, its certainly not easy to justify from a cost standpoint.

The technology is still in its infancy, but it is improving and I'm sure one day it will be a standard on high end exotics. For now its still too expensive to justify until production costs drop more.

 

Magnesium wheels would get you most of the way there.....

 

yes true, but most of the failures the Dymags had were attributed to the Magnesium hubs, not the carbon barrels themselves. They are just not strong enough to deal with the stresses in many cases so you are sacrificing strength. Its even harder to do magnesium/carbon hybrids (essentially the dymags). HRE partnered with Dymag and did aluminum one piece center hubs w/ an outer ring on the edge to join all the spokes, this strengthened the design and none of those have had any failures that I know of.

Im sure one day it will improve, but for now the "low hanging fruit" is definitely the rotors.

 

Yes, that's why I said the cost is the problem. Oh well, at least I can dream of these!

 

Carbon wheels are pretty nifty items. Difficult to get right, but then, the old 80/20 rule applies here. Buy lightweight aftermarket wheels, for 20% of the cost, then you have 80% of the money left to lose weight elsewhere...

 

Dymag currently makes 100% CF wheels for motorcycles...about $3500 for the pair. They're pretty nifty, that's for sure.

 

I agree with Stu, spend 20% the price on lightweight billet wheels (like Rennen, HRE monoblocks) then spend the rest of the saved money on bunch of other mods

 

The price savings is nice, but you won't get nearly the same weight redux by the sound of it.

 

As a seller of most all types I'm of the opinion a good forged wheel like HRE, OZ, or BBS may weigh a bit more, but are worth the piece of mind. Carbon wheels never took off for a reason - nobody has figured out a way to keep them failing. If the concept worked on more than superbike, F1 and Indycar would be all over it. But if you walk down pit row at any race and you still see forged alloy.

Great concept, but just not there yet. I doubt it ever will be as even street wheels have to tolerate unbelievable stresses - even under daily driving.