Letter From the Editor: Wheel Nuts
10/01/2005
Although I am no sports aficionado, it is my understanding that among the followers of ball games involving bases, baskets and, most specifically, feet, there exists an individual known as the Monday Morning Quarterback. A pompous expert, he proffers analysis and opinion free of charge to all—or none—within earshot. As an uncredentialed automobile designer, dispensing verdicts on the efficacy of such and such a car’s design is one of my greatest pleasures. And like any Monday Morning Automobile Designer, I can praise or pillory a product without regard for focus groups, engineers, or a phalanx of accountants insisting that four lug nuts are more cost-effective than five. Which brings us to the subject of this brief disquisition.The wheel, born of prehistoric ingenuity and necessity, has, with the 21st-century motorcar, become a laughingstock. It has suffered a bathetic descent from automotive cornerstone to absurd decorative accessory, as evinced by the hundreds of atrocious offerings available on the aftermarket.
The worst offenders, second only to the idiotic spinning variety, are suitable for the grim reaper’s chariot, with razor-sharp centers styled to resemble menacing scythes, hooks, and blades of torture. Motorcycles, too, are not immune from these designs. Pure kitsch, they are the product of Beowulf’s own CNC machine and could easily grace the corniest heavy metal album cover.
Germane to this rant is the humble lug nut. With the proscription by our
ever-encroaching government of the elegant knockoff—rendered to perfection by
Borrani—the modern passenger car has been relegated to wheels attached by a
handful of tiny but effective fasteners. Some nationalities—the contrarian
French come immediately to mind—employ as few as three; America’s new Cadillac
CTS-V has double that number. The most elegant wheels use a quintet of nuts,
whereas many quirkier automobiles sport wheels with four. But what of the
portion attaching rim to hub, and what do lug nuts have to do with anything?
Call it balance, harmony, or the alignment of celestial bodies (not to
mention distribution of stress loads), but it is this quarterback’s opinion that
the most successful designs acknowledge the relationship between spokes and
nuts, and must relate one-to-one or in multiples thereof. A five-lug design must
have five or 10 spokes (15 are too many to clean), whereas a four-bolt pattern
must have two, four, eight, or 12 extensions. Solid disc wheels in steel or
alloy are exempt from the quarterback’s rules and may have any number of
functional or decorative circumferential perforations. Ditto wheels with caps
that cover the hub and its surrounding nuts. But six-, seven-, nine-, and
11-spoke designs fail the test without a corresponding number of nuts, and I
submit that truly iconic designs support these observations. Extra points go to
natural or paint finishes. On modern wheels, chrome must be used judiciously,
lest the vehicle mimic a mouth full of silver teeth.
These revelations were hammered home this summer at the Art Center Car Classic ’05, an event that has risen to prominence over the past five years as one of the most interesting, diverse, and prestigious concours in the country (www.artcenter.edu/carclassic). This year’s show, Legends: Timeless Automotive Design, featured more than 100 exceptional automobiles by invitation of Art Center College’s Transportation Design Department chair Stewart Reed and his selection committee. For the record, Art Center matriculates the majority of today’s world-class auto designers, and cars as diverse as the Gremlin and the Enzo have been penned by Art Center graduates. This year’s winning design was a 1947 Cisitalia owned by the Petersen Automotive Museum; a more beautiful piece of automotive sculpture is hard to imagine. And while its wheels were modest—as is the car—they broke none of the rules. Come to think of it, none of the other cars did, either.
Robert Ross
Editor/Creative Director