Part 1 Wheels and tyres
THE WHEEL AND TYRE PACKAGE IS WHAT defines the car as being a land-based machine; those four perfectly circular elements are fundamental to telling us what it is that we are looking at. That sounds obvious, but this brilliant, probably 3000-year-old invention immediately implies motion.
The origins of today’s alloy wheels are now 80 years distant. Aircraft experience during the Second World War led to the development of magnesium race car wheels by Halibrand in America, whilst in the UK in the 1950s Dunlop produced cast aluminium alloy race wheels for Jaguar.
By the 1980s, cast alloy wheels were either optional extras or, on high performance cars, part
