The Original Brief
When we began the VF-101 project in early 2025, the brief was deceptively simple: create a wheel that could serve as the foundation of our monoblock lineup — versatile enough to look at home on both a classic 911 and a modern M4, strong enough for track use, and light enough to deliver measurable performance gains.
Lead designer Michael Torres recalls the early concept phase: "We pinned up photos of about fifty different cars on the studio wall — everything from a 1973 Carrera RS to a brand-new Corvette Z06. The wheel had to work on all of them. That's an incredibly difficult design problem."
The team began with hand sketches before moving to CAD. Early concepts ranged from a radical 12-spoke design to an ultra-minimalist 5-spoke. None of them felt right — they were either too aggressive or too conservative, too heavy or too fragile in simulation.
The Breakthrough
The breakthrough came in month seven, when a team member proposed a split-spoke approach. By splitting each of five primary spokes into twin arms, the design achieved the visual density of a 10-spoke wheel while maintaining the structural simplicity of a 5-spoke layout. The split-spoke architecture also created natural channels for brake airflow — a happy accident that became a key performance feature.
"That was the moment everything clicked," says Torres. "We ran the first FEA simulation on the split-spoke design and immediately saw we were onto something. The stress distribution was remarkably even — no hot spots, no areas of concern. It was one of those rare designs where the aesthetic and the engineering aligned perfectly from the start."
Despite the promising simulation results, the team pushed through eleven more design iterations — tweaking spoke thickness by fractions of a millimeter, adjusting the radius where spokes meet the barrel, experimenting with different lip profiles. Each change was validated through FEA, CFD, and physical prototype testing.
Production Challenges
The VF-101's complex spoke geometry presented significant manufacturing challenges. The deep undercuts between split spokes required custom tooling and a completely reworked CNC tool path strategy. The first prototypes took 14 hours of machine time each — far too long for production viability.
Over the following months, the manufacturing team worked alongside the designers to optimize every aspect of the machining process. Tool paths were refined, cutting strategies were revised, and custom fixturing was developed. By the time the VF-101 entered production, machine time had been reduced to 6.5 hours per wheel — still among our longest, but commercially viable.
"There were moments when we wondered if the design was simply too ambitious to manufacture at scale," admits Torres. "But every time we hit a wall, someone on the team found a way through. That's the culture here — we don't compromise on the vision."