American Racing Custom Wheels Make Your Truck Look Legitimate For Street Racing

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June 24, 2009

Custom after-market car wheels from American Racing are a great example of how seeing and servicing a niche within an American subculture can evolve into a mainstream business. The subculture we are talking about here is the California car culture that spawned drag racing, funny cars and street racing. The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean and others immortalized the culture in song while pop culture's Dickens, Tom Wolfe, chronicled it in his book The Tangerine Flake Cream Colored Baby. American Racing custom wheels are an object lesson in how to become a cultural icon. Get American Racing Vehicle Custom Wheels.

After the end of World War II, car hobbyists in southern California and the San Francisco Bay areas began to customize their cars in imaginative ways. A synergy between what came to be known as Funny Car builders and street racers met in the nascent sport of drag race.

Drag racing is the only racing style to have grown out of urban driving. The original Christmas tree that starts drag races was the standard three color stop light. The quarter mile drag race was not a variation on the track run by quarter horses - it was the distance from one stop light to another.

Once Romeo began cruising and bruising the local streets and strips in his revolutionary mags, word quickly spread among street racing enthusiasts. Other racers begged Jim and Romeo to make mags for them. Demand was so relentless that it became clear a profitable business could be made designing, manufacturing and selling after-market wheels for street and drag racing and American Racing Equipment was incorporated by Romeo, Jim and design engineer Tom Griffith in 1956. The company was serviced the street racing subculture until the early Sixties, when the famous Torq Thrust wheel took the company mainstream.

The radical shape of the spokes ('tapered parabolic' in car design lingo) revolutionized wheel design. This breakthrough has long become standard in the industry, but American Wheel is still the company that the after-market industry and mainstream auto makers as well look to for the evolution of the automobile wheel.

The American Racing Torq Thrust wheel was so innovative and so stylish that it crossed over frpm the car fanatic market to mainstream America. Cars that we think of as prime examples of American Iron muscle cars, like the Chevy Bel-Air, were actually targeting the conservative mid-market when they were introduced. But when A set of Torq Thrust American Racing custom wheels were added, the car suddenly became an entirely different animal. Today original the Torq Thrust wheels are highly prized by car collectors.

Where did this collector's item come from and why is it so sought after? The answer to that question shows both the quality of American Racing custom wheels and the company's penetration into pop culture.

All of the 340 General Lees that Warner Brothers Studio had built during the 7 seasons of The Dukes of Hazzard TV series had Vector wheels. 321 of those vehicles crashed doing the spectacular, pre-CGI stunt jumps the series was famous for. One of those jumps resulted in a broken American Racing Truck Custom Wheels wheel. That's one broken American Racing Truck Custom Wheels out of 1,284 stunt jumps that resulted in a totaled vehicle. They're the best custom wheels.

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