Does Wheel Weight Really Matter?

Is wheel weight really a myth or does it actually affect the performance of your OEM wheels? Let's have a closer look. Some people care about the extra half a pound as they use their vehicles for performance reasons and not day-to-day casual driving. Having lightweight wheels can significantly improve turn capabilities, quarter-mile times, fuel efficiency, and aesthetics of your OEM wheels.

This includes discussing sprung weights, unsprung weights, sprung to unsprung ratio, and rotational mass for our car wheels.   

What is sprung weight?

Sprung weight is the weight held by the suspension that means that any weight that is above the suspension weight can be considered as sprung weight.

It can be the weight of your body, car computer, chassis motor, your interior, and even passenger weights so basically anything above the suspension. The suspension itself is not included in the sprung weight.

This leads to people shaving the metal in the rim designs and reducing the rim width itself.

Sprung vs unsprung weight is important as it is the sprung weight that maximizes the traction of our OEM wheels keeping the vehicle stick to the ground during extreme turns.

What is unsprung weight?

This is the weight that is not supported by the weight of the vehicle. This includes car wheels, car rims, hub bearing, axle shaft, car, and all items of this nature.

If you do not have the right sprung weight to match the unsprung weight then you will have issues while turning your car at high speeds. In this ratio, you want to minimize the sprung weight as much as possible for ultimate performance.

How does the unsprung weight affect the performance of your car?

Well, most of the unsprung weight is rotational and a rotating body requires more momentum to drive the vehicle. This means that each additional pound has an added effect on how much energy would be required to turn, rotate and stop the car wheels of your unsprung components.

Under the Lens of Racing Cars/ Drag Racing:

The general concept is that the rotating mass is roughly three times harder to accelerate and deaccelerate than the sprung weight. This means that dropping 10 to 15 pounds from your car wheels and using a lighter set of OEM wheels would add up to massively increasing the car performance.

This can be understood in terms of drag racing as reducing a tenth of a second. Thus, less weight also means lesser bounces while rotation maintaining more grip and can increase the car performance while racing.

Under the Lens of Daily drive:

Even if you are not a racer the lightweight wheels can be beneficial in terms of cost-saving. The economics improve especially with electric or hybrid vehicles. Light-weight wheels will allow you to save more energy required to drive your car.

In terms of fuels, they will also save you a few bucks as the engine does not require you to work as hard to reach a speed compared to a normal set of car wheels. Other than the sprung vs unsprung ratio the next important parameter is the rotational mass.

Rotational Mass:

Rotational mass is just mass that is rotating it can be in any shape or form. In our case car wheels becomes the perfect example.

The rotational mass becomes of extreme importance as we know that our wheels are spinning so weight matters a lot. So heavier the car wheel more the rotational mass and this can be more difficult on your vehicle. Turning the wheels in return becomes difficult when the weight increases.

The rotational weight is what affects the drive the most. You should shave the rims farther from the hub bore. The more the weight is around the center of the wheel the more rotational mass is going to affect the drive of the vehicle.

Conclusion:

Lightweight wheels improve your drive by smoothing out your acceleration. Whether you are looking to improve your quarter-mile times, take fast and sharp turns, increase fuel efficiency and save yourselves some money. Yes, wheel weight is important. You can always visit or shop online from Factory Wheel Warehouse for your new or remanufactured car wheels and car rims. You can also check out Elite of Albany for the best car repair services.

For professional customer services about rims and wheels call us at +1 518-579-9260.

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