Super Touring Car Championship facing potential wheel issues

One of the front running teams in the HSCC Super Touring Car Championship fears that a lack of wheels could threaten the future of the popular series.

Speaking to Historic Racing Technology magazine, Jamie Cleland, the man behind his father John Cleland’s return behind the wheel of his own 1997 Vauxhall Vectra, stated that he believes the series should approach companies “as a body” to try and keep costs down in order to keep the cars able to compete.

The problem with acquiring wheels for Super Touring machinery is that, in a time when no expense was spared for finding an extra tenth of a second, the wheels were made of the strong yet light magnesium, a material that Cleland says has an official ‘shelf life’ of five years.

“The magnesium explodes,” he said, referring to an incident at Oulton Park where Tom Andrew’s Alfa Romeo 155’s wheel literally exploded, taking out five spokes of the wheel in the process. As a result, the car in question raced on wet tyres in dry conditions as a precaution. It was the second time Andrew had such an issue, having had a similar failure at the 2013 Silverstone Classic.

Cleland had spoken to OZ, the company that originally made the wheels for Triple Eight’s Vectras in 1997, but it no longer produces the wheels, with the moulds also having been destroyed.

It is also not simply a case of bringing in a spec wheel for the entire series to use, as the later Super Tourers had very little similarities when it came to the wheels, with distinct rim specifications being used by each manufacturer, making them unable to be used on other cars.

“I’m currently talking to a company in Spain to make up 20 wheels for our car,” he continued. “But 20 wheels is a small number so the price goes up. What we need is to approach companies like that as a body, offer them a larger order with some specified for a Nissan, some for a Vauxhall, some for a Volvo and so on.

“In a short space of time we may not be able to take these cars out for something as mundane as not being able to get wheels for them, which is worrying.”