BAC Reinvents The Wheel At FOS

“It’s the first carbon-hybrid wheel for a production road car,” Ian Briggs tells us. The pencil-thin lacework of spokes looks pretty sexy too, but it’s what the wheel does to the single-seat Mono’s polar moment of inertia that’s most important.

"The new wheel saves weight but crucially it also moves the weight further out from the centre of the wheel where it helps the car’s moment of inertia.” Which is Ian Briggs’ way of saying it should make the Mono slightly faster.

Carbon wheels are used in motor sport but, says Ian, the spokes are prone to flexing on bumpy roads if used on a road car. Hit a pothole and there can be expensive consequences.

The new BAC wheel, launched at FoS this year, is a hybrid of carbon and aluminium. The rim is carbon and the spokes are aluminium, being machined from a single billet of the alloy. The rim and wheel centre are bonded and bolted together.

The result is the first part-carbon wheel suitable for a road car. Ian Briggs says: “The wheel has passed all the tests. In fact it exceeds by three times the requirement for road wheels.” Another result is that BAC’s reinvented wheel can come in any colour you like.

And will it make the Mono – already stupendously fast in 2.5-litre form launched at FoS last year – any quicker? “It should do, but we will know for sure over the weekend. We plan to run the car with old and new wheels to gauge the difference.”

Any difference is bound to be minuscule, but then as Ian Briggs says, chasing the smallest improvements is the BAC way. “Every single part of the car is constantly looked at to see if it can be made lighter and better, right down to the head of a single titanium bolt…”

The new wheels cost £10,000 a set on a Mono, or £12,500 on their own.

Photography by Pete Summers