I've been studying vintage sports cars for a while (mainly from the 1950s), and I've noticed that a great deal of sports cars on into the 1970s had spoke wheels. Spoke wheels on sports cars never made sense to me because I couldn't fathom a vehicle with spoke wheels really being able to carve the corners. Do you think that spoke wheels would help drum brakes cool down quicker considering that the spoke wheel provides an unimpeded way for the surrounding air to make contact with the drum? Has anyone ever given this any thought besides me, or am I just crazy?
Spokes were good when the tires were hard and wheels were narrow. Which is not to say they didn't need a lot of truing. Soft tires + wider rims = easily bent spokes. Coolest wires I ever heard of were Borrani's with like a zillion spokes. But they are in a league of their own. https://www.ruoteborrani.com/en/
Most of the pictures I’ve seen on the C Jaguar race cars had wires. But the D’s and racing E’s used a Dunlop disc style. So the change was taking place then. They looked like this. https://realmengineering.com/d-style-wheels/ This was around 1954, some 8 years after Halibrand was used on the Indy cars. More or less As noted above the Borrani’s are at least one exception. I don’t know, but I suspect at speed the airflow is around the spokes rather than thru them.
Most Indy cars ran spoke wheels until one folded up on Wilbur Shaw in '41. He was leading at the time and if he had not crashed he might have been the first 4 time winner.
I knew a guy who raced an Austin Healy. He said with wires on there was always rubber witness marks in the upper fender wells after a race. Never when he ran disc wheels.
The car hangs from the spokes, so they'd have to be pretty beefy in a wider wheeled car. But I mean, the spokes form a truss because they're angled away from one another (think train bridge). So if you duplicate that truss over the cir***ference of the rim, and the load is carried and relieved hundreds of times per revolution, I doubt there would be m***ive amounts of movement, but there'd still be movement. The math involved with figuring out how much deflection in the rim at what velocities and shearing forces, is out there. I'm just not brainy enough to find that equation, let alone use it.
All I know is that every time I would lift a spoke wheel it seemed to take less effort than a similar sized solid rim. Less unsprung weight
That's what I was thinking. At least with the spokes, the heat from the drum wouldn't be trapped behind it like on a regular "disc" wheel.
The Jalopy Journal
