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American Racing Custom Wheels Make Your SUV Look Legit For Racing

Custom after-market car wheels from American Racing are a great example of how seeing and servicing a niche within an American subculture can evolve into a mainstream business. The subculture we are talking about here is the California car culture that spawned drag racing, funny cars and street racing. The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean and others immortalized the culture in song while pop culture’s Dickens, Tom Wolfe, chronicled it in his book The Tangerine Flake Cream Colored Baby. American Racing custom wheels are an object lesson in how to become a cultural icon. Get American Racing Car Custom Wheels.

Cars were customized in home garages to perform in ways that original equipment manufacturers never intended. Machines took on mutated shapes that ranged from the muscular profile of a chopped Mercury to the spidery efficiency of the early dragsters. In 1956 three of those early innovators joined forces to design and build after-market car wheels for street racing.

Between them, these two invented the mag wheel. Using spoked magnesium wheels with a strength to weight ratio unheard of in any other automobile wheel format, they revolutionized drag racing, first, and American car wheel design second.

Once Romeo began cruising and bruising the local streets and strips in his revolutionary mags, word quickly spread among street racing enthusiasts. Other racers begged Jim and Romeo to make mags for them. Demand was so relentless that it became clear a profitable business could be made designing, manufacturing and selling after-market wheels for street and drag racing and American Racing Equipment was incorporated by Romeo, Jim and design engineer Tom Griffith in 1956. The company was serviced the street racing subculture until the early Sixties, when the famous Torq Thrust wheel took the company mainstream.

The radical shape of the spokes (‘tapered parabolic’ in car design lingo) revolutionized wheel design. This breakthrough has long become standard in the industry, but American Wheel is still the company that the after-market industry and mainstream auto makers as well look to for the evolution of the automobile wheel.

American Racing custom wheels have since ascended into that pantheon where a product becomes a symbol for a life style: think Harley, Blackberry or Royal Dolton. Certain American Racing wheels are prized by collectors – most especially early Sixties Torq Thrust. Well, maybe not m-o-s-t especially. The absolute most valuable American Racing wheel is a broken Vector model owned by a collector in Sylmar, California, according to the American Racing website.

Remember The Dukes of Hazzard? Of course you do. Over the course of the series’ 147 episodes and 2 TV movies, Warner Brothers built 340 General Lees and each one was outfitted with American Racing custom wheels – Vectors being the wheel model Warner Brothers used. All but 19 of these ’69 Chargers were totaled doing stunt jumps. Of the 1284 American Racing Vectors that were on those 319 totaled General Lees, only one Vector did not survive. And yes, it belongs to a collector.

All of the 340 General Lees that Warner Brothers Studio had built during the 7 seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard TV series had Vector wheels. 321 of those vehicles crashed doing the spectacular, pre-CGI stunt jumps the series was famous for. One of those jumps resulted in a broken American Racing Truck Custom Wheels wheel. That’s one broken American Racing Custom Wheels out of 1,284 stunt jumps that resulted in a totaled vehicle. They’re the best custom wheels.

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