APEX VS-5RS 10,000 Ton Forged Wheels

Motorsports are Niche
The majority of forged wheels sold around the world are not used for racing or motorsports, they’re just used on the street. It makes financial sense for a forging supplier to optimise their blanks for the production of simpler street wheels. Why incorporate expensive features into a die and drive up the cost of all their wheels if only a small percentage will be used in demanding applications? Because featureless blanks intended for basic street-wheels cost less, there’s a big trend for brands to create wheels using them and design wheels that scream motorsport with their styling, yet be compromised on key features.

All manufacturers are limited by what they can machine out of the raw forgings available to them, which are often purchased from and designed by a 3rd party supplier. Because APEX is focused on motorsports, we had to design new forging dies in order to create the wheels we wanted. We took years to roll out our forged wheel program as there were huge hurdles and costs to creating new dies. We did not want to compromise our designs by using existing blanks. We could have made wheels that are technically forged, but they wouldn’t have lived up to our standards and values. In this article we’ll cover the biggest difference between what APEX can produce with our Motorsport blanks vs. the limitations of what we call Street blanks.