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Originally Posted by Ro_Ja
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I read through this article, it seems like they removed *all* the weight from the area that bolts to the hub, and the wheel design has the spokes as far offset from the mating surface as possible. They didn't remove the weight from the rim area where the benefits would be greatest. They did remove weight where the reduction in stiffness would be significant, though.
For sure they removed enough material from the wheel that deformation became an issue affecting performance. Anyway the performance difference may perhaps bigger than I initially thought, but the linked Enkei test doesn't seem totally valid to me.
If the less-stiff wheel is effectively losing some camber, what happens when you dial it back in to compensate?
In the end, you design for maximum strength/stiffness for minimum weight. The wheel they took material out of had been designed to work with that material in place! So they were outside of the engineered-in strength right off the bat. I would be more interested to see a test of a forged wheel vs. cast of similar design, both designed to the same loads and the same overall wheel strength relative to material strengths. The Forged wheel would be a bit lighter, the cast wheel a bit stiffer, but the weight difference would be distributed over the wheel instead of concentrated near the hub (where lighter weight doesn't help much, but reduction in stiffness could hurt more). I bet you'd have a *damn* difficult time sussing out the lap time differences, particularly if each setup is optimized separately.