By Forged Wheels for the C8 Corvette
If you’ve been following along with our YouTube channel, you know that we’ve been taking our brand new 2020 C8 corvette out to Buttonwillow and Laguna Seca raceway doing development with KW Suspension on their coilovers for the car: the club sport system, and their brand new four-way adjustable variant 5 coilovers. In this article, we’re going to talk about the Forgeline GS1R monoblock dedicated track day wheels that we’ve chosen and why. We are a Forgeline dealer so if you’re looking for wheels or any of your other mods check us out at Motoroso.com where you can reach us on live chat or you can call us toll-free at 833.MOTOROSO that’s 833.668.6767. Let’s dig in.
VIDEO: HUGE WEIGHT SAVINGS WITH FORGED WHEELS ON THE C8 CORVETTE
When we knew we wanted dedicated wheels for the track, one of the best brands you can turn to in the industry is Forgeline Motorsports. This is a company that makes some of the best wheels in the industry and they really started out as being dedicated and completely focused on motorsports and racing performance. Of course, they’re now making wheels for a lot of different applications including the street but this is the GS1R wheel out of their motorsports series of products. Meaning this thing of course works fine on the street, but this is dedicated and truly engineered and intended for race track duty which is what we are going to be putting it through.
It’s a 19-inch front just like stock and a 20” rear, but we went to a 9.5” front which allowed us to go from a 225 to a 265 wide tire, and it’s an 11.5” wide rear allowing us to go up from the 305 rear to a 325 rear tire which is exactly what we have on the car now. We’ve got an apples-to-apples comparison on the tires. Now it’s also a 60 offset in the rear and a 47 offset in the front which is going to bring the wheels out to the edge of the car so that they look like they should. As you all know, OEM manufacturers for some reason tuck those wheels way in and it just looks ridiculous and can’t fit as big of a tire, so these matte bronze Forgeline wheels are going to look spectacular on the torch red car.
When it comes to how Forgeline manufactures wheels like these, they start with one big piece of aluminum and machine it down making it a monoblock wheel, which is about as strong as something can be. It’s the attention to detail that Forgeline uses to make these things the lightest and strongest in the industry right on down to things like their I-beam construction in the spokes which just cuts a little bit of material out of the sides without sacrificing the structural rigidity. Their goal with these wheels is for them to be ultra-strong, ultra-stiff, and ultra-light—one of the most important things in a performance wheel.
If you remember in science class when they took a bicycle tire, they stuck a handle through it, and spun the wheel, as you held both sides of the handles and as you turned it, you felt the centrifugal force of the wheel and how significant those forces can be. Imagine the weight of a big heavy automotive tire going 150 miles an hour. The forces are extreme and that rotational unsprung mass on a vehicle is extremely important to reduce because the lighter it is, the faster it can spin up and down. So you have less energy, less horsepower essentially, required to spin that wheel up and less energy required to slow that wheel down under braking. Not only is less braking force is required to slow the vehicle down, but most importantly when you’re going to tip into the corners left and right that rotational centrifugal force is not fighting against the steering, and makes the car feel extremely nimble. That lightweight reduction is going to make the car feel dramatically different.
The last reason for choosing these Forgeline wheels is because in the 19” wheel they were able to get the inside diameter of the barrel much larger to accommodate big brake upgrades. We have our Brembo six-piston kit coming which has the BM6 “alien fist” caliper and we’re going from a 350mm rotor up to a 380mm rotor and we need the room for that extra big brake kit without having to go to a 20-inch wheel. This makes it possible.
We were not expecting the kind of weight savings that we found when we weighed the wheels. It was 5lbs per front wheel and 9lbs per rear wheel for a total of 28lbs weight savings across all four wheels. That is going to be very noticeable, and that unsprung rotational mass makes a much bigger difference so this is going to feel like the car is much much lighter and more nimble. If you are looking to get a set of these Forgeline wheels, you can buy them on Motoroso.com, where you can browse over a million other top name-brand products, and the shipping is always free with no minimum. Thanks for reading.
