Wheel FAQs & Fitment Info

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Care and feeding of your 6UL wheels

Inspect your wheels before you mount tires for the first time. A scratched wheel with a tire on it is not covered under the warranty.
Torque lugs to vehicle manufacture recommendations.
After first drive on brand new wheels, retorque once. Retorque lugs after every track session or autocross day
Wash only with mild soap and water. Strong degreasers can damage the finish
Check track wheels for roundness and cracks every time you replace the tires. Track wheels get bent with use. New radial runout spec is .025″ lateral runout spec .015. Replace at .090 radial, .060 lateral
6~ 8″ wheels can be single plane balanced for track use. The 9″ and wider might require dual plane balance (weights on front & back) due to the extra width.

Powder coating

949 Racing wheels are T-6 heat treated and wet painted. If you wish to change the finish of the wheel, we recommend wet paint. Powder coating while durable, requires a curing process in which the temperature range overlaps the lower end of the annealing temperature. Annealing is the process of removing heat treating from a metal or alloy. There is a risk of excess powder coat curing temp adversely affecting the heat treating of the wheel. This potential reduction in heat treatment can reduce the strength and service life of the wheel. There is a special “low temperature” powder coat process that exists which reduces this risk of annealing. Unless you are 100% sure your wheels are being low temperature powder coated, we recommend against it altogether. Powder coating voids the 949 Racing structural warranty,

Hub Centering rings

6UL’s are lug centric except our Spec Miata and Spec E30 specific 15×7
A properly designed and manufactured wheel will not require hub centering
The purpose of a centering ring is to facilitate installation. Once the wheels are torqued, they are just along for the ride and neither support or transmit load.
Aftermarket wheels typically have two standardized hub center bores (“CH”) that allow the use of hub centering rings to adapt to various marques
5 lug wheels(including 6UL) typically 73.1 CH
4 lug wheel (including 6UL) typically 67.1 CH
949 Racing offers optional aluminum hub centering rings for ease of installation
Plastic hub rings tend to melt with brake heat encountered in high performance environments

Buying used wheels

Lightweight racing wheels, such as 949 racing and similar brands, can have a finite service life. Over time, fatigue and small bends from impacts can reduce their structural integrity. Racing, track use and autocross place far higher stresses and loads on a wheel than street driving. For this reason, we do not recommend purchasing used wheels of any brand that have been used in a motorsports environment, if you intend to do the same. Like old race horses, once they have done their work, they get put out to pasture. Purchasing used wheels for 100% street and city driving can be OK. But even then, carefully inspect your used wheels prior to purchase for cracks, bends, gouges, dings. When in doubt, stick with new wheels for your high performance car project.

Identify your 949 Racing Wheel

Gen 5: Sanger 6UL Coto 2023+
Gen 5 wheels can be identified by the flat, flush center cap. They also have chamfered spokes (beveled edges) and ball mill (grooves in sides of spoke)
- 10% higher load ratings than JWL/DOT standards. This is proven to reduce fatigue cracks to zero even with competition style driving. A feature we were first to bring to market in 2015 with our 15×10. This effective approach has since been adopted by other wheel companies.
- Tilt Casting Technology. Tilt casting creates a much denser crystalline structure in the final product. This translates to greater tensile strength and elongation compared to gravity or low pressure casting which most of the industry uses. The result is the highest strength to weight ratio of any casting process.
- Benchmark stiffness and fatigue life against the best wheels in the industry. We accomplish this by obtaining other brands wheels, 3D scanning, creating CAD models, simulating loads in FEA then physically testing the wheels in a US Lab. We know how strong the best are so we match or exceed those values.
- Knurled beads. The feature we first brought to aftermarket sports car wheels in 2009. Then an industry first and now widely adopted by other brands.
- Our proprietary 180° opposed dual valves for nitrogen/ dry air purging
- Flow forming barrels. This allows greater bending resistance, improved fatigue life and reduced weight.
- Valves set behind outer flange. This prevents the valve being damaged in wheel to wheel racing or even an accidental curb scuff.
- Anvil inner flange for increased resistance to bends from potholes and trackside excursions
- Lifetime structural warranty

Discontinued wheels Gen 1-4

Gen 4 6UL 2014-2018 has lug holes that line up symmetrically with the valve hole centerline. This design has the same great style as all previous 6UL’s but features a flow formed outer rim barrel.

Gen 3 6UL 2012-2013 has “VIA” stamp near the valve hole. For the generation 3 design, we increased the load capacity to 500kg and used the more stringent VIA test protocol.

Gen 2 6UL 2009-2012 has ” 6UL ” embossed right on the face of the wheel. The second generation 6UL wheels are low pressure (LP) cast and T6 heat treated. LP casting refers to the aluminum being forced into the wheel mold under pressure.

Gen 1 6UL 2006-2008 does not have “6UL” cast into the face.The first generation wheels were gravity cast and T4 solution heat treated.

6ULR 17″ (Discontinued)

The 6ULR is also be LP cast like the gen 2 6UL but features a flow formed, or spun forged, (also known as rotary forged) outer rim or bell. This is a one piece design. The still molten aluminum wheel with it’s center section already shaped is then spun. The outer rim is rolled between a mandrel and inner wheel form to slowly drawn into the final shape. With roll forming, the outer rim is actually formed under extreme pressure so its a form of hot forging. This pressure further aligns the grain structure in the outer rim area which allows the absolute minimum possible material be used for a given strength target. The mandrels are CNC so an engineer can precisely vary the thickness to a few thousandths of an inch based on the results of FEA (Finite Element Analysis).