While hunting for Kyusha Shoe paraphernalia, I recently stumbled upon something I never imagined existed.  The first image found was this look at a Volk Racing Centerlock.  I imagined that it was sourced from a catalog, or advertisement.  However a closer look revealed that it was actually…

… An Album Cover.

An album cover for a vinyl record… circa 1982… to celebrate the debut of the Rays Engineering Volk Racing Centerlock wheel.

The track list is composed of great car sounds and commentary on races and racers.

My translation reads…

Side A (Silver)

• From the 1980 Long Beach Grand Prix
• Piquet, Arnoux & Andretti Pit Work
• 1981 Monaco Grand Prix
• Steward Interview
• Last lap Ferrari Turbo – Monaco Grand Prix Winner
• Villeneuve’s Story

Side B (Gold)

• From the 1982 Lemans 24hr Race
• Start – Lanaudière (Montreal GP?)
• 400 kph fly-by
• Superb! Each cars cornering
• TWR RX7 Team Pit Work
• Goal in! Ickx Victory.
• Never before. Six Wins. (presumably regarding Jackie Ickx 1982 Lemans victory)

It is somewhat disappointing that its not really Rays Engineering specific content, but for the race enthusiast at the time, this would have been something very special.

Found on a yahoo auction archive site, this amazing find sold for less than a single of my favourite onigiri. 100円！　Yes, I imagine that not many people are searching through the music category for car stuff. View the expired auction details here.  I regret that I missed it… even if gaining the ability to play it would have required a considerable investment.

A couple of years ago while searching through craigslist for the usual tags I came across an ad marked something along the lines of “JDM Wheel Pair”. Thinking that I’d had some luck flipping pairs of wheels in the past I clicked that ad and looked a bit a further only to find a practically useless description and one completely indistinguishable pixellated photo. For $40 however, I figured it was still worth pursuing.

After a few texts back and forth with the seller, it turned out that the he was just down the street from me. I swung over, but as luck would have, found not a wheel pair of wheels but two completely different individual wheels in a mud covered mess. One wheel I quickly identified as an SSR EX-C. The other was a four spoke design, and total mystery to me. I didn’t think that anyone would want to buy these single wheels, but thought they would make cool display pieces so I picked them up anyways!

Checking the database here at the time, as well as all the other online resources I knew of, I had no luck identifying the 4 spoke wheel. A few years later I had purchased some vintage Motor Fan magazines off of Yahoo Auctions. I was flipping through the pages of the earliest one I had (from 1979) and one advertisement caught my eye. I quickly ran to the garage, grabbed the crusty mystery wheel and compared details. It was the Target Racing “TR-03”. My particular wheel was the 14 6J +15 size. I still have very little information on the Target Racing brand, and their various models of wheels. If wheels could talk it would be very interesting to know how it ended up just a few miles away from me after more than a 30 year-long journey.

I have always been a huge fan of SSR’s old school wheels. For months after I got my MK-3’s, I didn’t consider getting anything but SSR’s. At the time, I knew about some of the more rare classic Japanese wheels; Devil Japan Shadow Spokes, Hayashi Techno and Yayoi, TRD Tosco, Work Equips, etc, but I really didn’t have a desire to look deeper into the rare wheel market to find something truly unique and rare.

About 2 months ago, while browsing YAJ, I came across an SSR I had never seen before. A single 4 spoke, with the familiar oval “SpeedStar” logo on the end of one of the spokes and a decently large dent in the lip. Without hesitation I bid on the wheel, and watched the days count down to the end of the auction. With no other bids, I won the auction and waited for my package to show up on my doorstep.

When my wheel finally showed up I was amazed when I pulled it out of the box. It was far lighter than any other wheel I had ever held in my hands. I looked for clues as to what model this wheel was, but found nothing. I took pictures of it and posted it online in hopes of finding someone with information on the wheel. It took another month before I found out from @prkbkr on Instagram that the wheel is a Speed Star F.4. Without a doubt, this has supercharged my search for the rarest, raddest and oldest wheels out there.

お久しぶりです。

I should be apologetic, after all, I’m the guy who more than a year ago now wanted your emails… but I’m only one guy, and you all easily overwhelmed me. If you submitted content, and I didn’t respond, be sure that I checked things out and flagged your contributions for a later update. Perhaps now those updates will commence.

How can I not get riled up seeing stuff like these? These Walter Wolf’s and a couple of other equally impressive finds showed up in my email inbox this morning courtesy of Robbie J.

The size of this example is 14 6J +20, and if you know your wheels, they will look intensely familiar despite being nothing like other Walter Wolf wheels. It seems that what we are looking at is a re-badged Bridgstone Preo, which is a pretty awesome wheel to begin with. Clearly those big square center caps and silver coloured bolts add a lot though!

Some Canadian guy put the coolest wheels ever manufactured for a Toyota on his FRS, and it makes me extremely horny. Tom’s is making a modern Igeta for the ZN6, but it looks pretty lame with modern positive offset. WRONG CHOICE Tachi Oiwa Motorsports!

A reader shared these ultra-rare AC Courreges ACB dish that recently came and quickly went on Yahoo Auctions. This is certainly the cleanest set I’ve seen! Sized 13 5.5J +38 with PCD100 they sold for 31000円.

Check out this reader submitted photo of Volk C1’s…. complete with aero rings and centers.  I’ll admit, this is the first time I’ve seen a fully assembled C1… and it has rocked my world.  If the Millennium Falcon needed wheels, you know they’d look like this.

The same reader also has this C1 Carbon and Aluminum steering wheel. Boss finds.

In celebration of its 35th anniversary, JAWA (Japanese Alloy Wheel Association) released a very limited edition book detailing the history of the wheel, and the Japanese Alloy Wheel.  As the standard setter for alloy wheels in Japan, JAWA has tested and stamped practically every wheel ever produced in Japan.  This book also suggests that they’ve kept a damn good record of everything that has come through their doors.  The final pages of it appear to be a catalog of every wheel ever produced!

In other words, life has lost all meaning.  Ha!

But while the book appears to have been for sale at one point, it is currently sold out.  A phone conversation with JAWA also indicated that there are no plans to print more copies.  They have however, put a PDF version of the book online for all want to see… minus the good part that we all want to see.  That PDF is HERE.

Thanks to JCP for sharing on Work Wheels Japan Facebook page.

I guess it’s just the way things spread, but ironically now that I’m distancing myself from the kyusha scene, I’m getting a lot of emails and comments about wheels. Most people are looking to show me SSR MKII’s and Advan A3A’s, but occasionally some of them present me with something incredibly rare and cool.

These Volk Racing 84C’s for example, named for their fitment on the 1984 Toyota Tom’s 84C Prototype, were found in incredible shape with the disks and hardware still brand new and bagged! A reader from Russia is going to be rolling around on these soon.

Edit: The center locking mechanism was questioned, and more details were provided. Check the star shaped cover, and center cap that fits over top to hide a conventional PCD underneath.

Someone recently emailed me about these shoes found on yahoo auction: definitely the unicorn of kyusha wheels. No idea what he paid, but I know what he could sell them for and who might buy them. Rad stuff. There is very little documentation on stuff this old (1981-1985ish), and of this variety very very few are still in existence. In close to ten years of searching I never once saw a set like this for sale, and only knew of their existence because of one shakotan RA21 seen in DoriTen. At that point I didn’t notice any stampings on the wheel face. Here we see SS-07-14… where SS denotes Super Star, 07 denotes the sub-model number and 14 the wheel diameter. This particular set is 14 9J -16 and seems to be in original condition, wheel weight of 5.65kg/each also indicates that even 30 years ago Japan knew how to make a light wheel.