Super Sport

Five flashing spokes. Nighttime glinting wildly off brilliantly buffed metal. Looking tougher in a ride that's already tough. This is the world of the performance wheel, and we think we can argue convincingly that no single wheel design has defined the performance world more forcefully than the Cragar S/S. None. Even those who prefer other styles would probably never question that statement. Custom or performance wheels have erroneously been called "mags" for generations, but if that's a misused term, it has been given life by the creation of this great American aftermarket brand.

"Cragar" is something of an acronym, the name having been created by Crane Gartz, the heir to a Los Angeles publishing fortune, who tried to market the Miller-Goossen head for Model As during the Depression and eventually sold the patterns to Bell Auto Parts founder George Wight, who died in 1943. At that point, a young kid named Roy Richter, who had been a successful race driver and a Cragar fabricator (when it was owned by Gartz and former "boy wonder of the board tracks" Harlan Fengler), mortgaged everything he had to lease the tiny Bell auto shop, which was doing an increasingly strong business producing and selling the Cragar parts.

Through the end of the 1940s, and increasingly so for the next 15 years, the American high-performance industry boomed, but the performance or custom wheel remained largely unknown on the street. Hot rodders still relied heavily on old steel discs or Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels. Owners of newer cars simply removed the hubcaps to look tough. Real "mags" were actually made from magnesium, most famously Halibrands, and aimed at pure racing cars. Later came the so-called chrome reversed wheel. Spoked custom wheels, when they appeared, usually consisted of cast-aluminum centers riveted to chromed steel rims, not the best formula for integrity. The area where spokes met the wheel's center flange was usually especially weak, given that that area had to endure most of the kinetic force being applied to the unit.

Richter figured he could do better. Intending to use the Cragar name, he came up with a patented method of mating the wheel's aluminum spokes and center with the steel rim through pressure casting. As Richter told biographer Art Bagnall, "We determined that a stock wheel was permanently distorted at 26,000 pounds (of pressure)...by changing spoke depth and rim location, we were able to attain a minimum static load strength of 41,000 pounds."

Specifically, the manufacturing technique that Richter employed involved taking the chrome rim, which was selected for being impervious to high impacts and side-directed thrust forces, and making it the focus of the wheel's overall strength. In a break with then-common industry practice, no rivets or drive screws were used to attach the rim to the wheel's center section. Five steel locking clips, one for each of the wheel's spokes, were cast into the center section. Each of the steel locking clips was then welded to the wheel's steel rim.

The new wheel, a simple but handsome design incorporating tapered, polished spokes, was called the Super Sport or as expressed on its hub, the S/S. The very first production set went to Hot Rod publisher Ray Brock, who installed them on his new 1964½ Ford Mustang. They rapidly multiplied by the tens of thousands, and swiftly found their way to drag strips, road courses, and even to auto thrill show teams. Only a few months had elapsed since the S/S was introduced before demand forced Richter to relocate production to a new plant in nearby Bell Gardens, where about 20 workers soon found themselves doing nothing else but assembling S/S wheels for a voracious marketplace.

Within another six months, that 5,000-square-foot plant would be supplanted by one in South Gate with seven times the space. Richter's health began to crumble, however, and in 1971, he sold his interest in Cragar to Wynn's oil. Richter died in 1983 at age 69. Today, the S/S is still vibrant, sold in a huge range of offsets and diameters, and is produced by Cragar Industries Inc. of Phoenix.