It is troubling to be continually dealing with this wheel failure rumor. Once and for all, it wasn't true. Below is a response I wrote a few months ago to this same topic but here is a bit more.

This started on an Audi forum. It was a disgruntled boyfriend of a customer (now husband). I tried to contact him several times to discuss why he was saying this about us. He wouldn't talk to me. I contacted VRL (Viper Racing League) personally and discussed the weekend event where several failures supposedly occurred. I was told it was completely untrue. They did feel our wheels were not track wheels, but they hadn't seen an HRE wheel in years or heard of our Comp series or anything about us in recent memory. I educated them to the facts about us and our wheels. They then posted on their website that the rumor was untrue. It didn't help. We contacted PCA and IMSA and got that there was absolutely no ban on HRE or any other brand.

I did discuss wheel failures and racing with VRL and they admitted that they've seen all brands fail on the track, including the famed BBS. This is to be expected and is why continuous inspection is absolutely necessary and is what all professional teams do. They also throw the wheels away once the life is run out of them. I also told them their policy at the time of recertifying wheels for 2 years after the manufacturer inspected them was flawed and that regular inspection was absolutely required. I'm not sure if they changed their policy.

There was also a photo of a cracked wheel shown on the thread. The wheel shown in the pictures was a Kinesis wheel. That failure was attributed to their powdercoater overheating the wheel. This event pretty much killed Kinesis as we all know it. Too bad because they were one of the good guys.

Basically, if anything, HRE is guilty of not taking care of this guy's girlfriend's issue properly. If we had handled her problem to her satisfaction (I don't even know what the problem was because he wouldn't speak to me about it) we would not have been slandered in this way. The internet is a powerful thing and one customer has done serious damage to our reputation and cost us many customers. All based on untruths. Am I upset with him? Nope. I'm upset with us for making him feel that he needed to do this to us and I'm upset at us for not being able to combat the rumor effectively.

The lesson I have learned is that we need to have the absolute highest level of customer service in the industry. Today if you do experience a problem with an HRE wheel, our goal is to fix it as quickly as possible and to win your business for life. It is a rare time that we get to interact with the customer directly, but we want you to know why buying an HRE is a different experience. We stand behind our wheels, our service and most of all our customers.

So this is my response a couple months ago elsewhere on 6Speed. Pretty much similar to above but please read it as well.

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First of all, I agree whole heartedly with the sentiment that you should definitely not do any modifications to your HRE or any other wheel for that matter. If you have a fitment request, call us and we'll see if we can accomodate you by making a change.

As for HRE's reputation, I assume people might be referring to the Audi Forum post from a few years ago. I'm sure you can find our official response by searching as well, but basically after spending significant amounts of time researching supposed track failures and speaking to the track organizations named, we came to find that the information was simply false and apparently posted for personal reasons. The wheel shown in photos was a competitor's wheel and their failure was due to overheating by their powdercoater. This is one of the reasons why HRE powdercoats and strips our wheels in-house. Unfortunately this rumor did and still does horrible damage to our reputation; evident by the fact that I have to respond to it still today.

If you have any concerns at all about the quality of an HRE wheel, please never hesitate to call or email me directly. As the head of design, engineering, and production at HRE, I am intimately aware of the details regarding our wheel quality and design and can easily explain or show you how we do it and why we do it the way that we do.

Better yet, if you want to attend one of our open houses like we're having this weekend, I give several tours and can answer any questions regarding our design, engineering or production. If after that and you still have any doubts about our commitment to quality, you should know that we recently received TUV verification of our engineering, manufacturing and quality control processes at our facility here in Vista, CA by passing an audit by German TUV officials. This allows us to send our wheels to Germany for structural testing and TUV certification.

We are in the process of doing just that and the M40 and P40s have already rec'd their TUV certifications. This is not inexpensive to do and unlike others, we're really doing it, not just saying it. Basically if you don't see the TUV logo w/ the serial number, it isn't real and TUV is going to have an issue with any company that falsely claims to have TUV certified products.

I'm honestly disappointed with the level of quality that American based manufacturers are supplying to the market. It is frankly shameful and irresponsible, not to mention the safety and liability concerns. It simply doesn't do any of us any good. Companies like BBS and Champion are not included in this group of course. They do it the right way and we're proud to compete against companies that share a philosophy for providing high quality products. It keeps all of us pushing forward.

So I can only ask that you contact us directly. I've seen a lot of "experts" cropping up on 6-speed lately and while they may sound like they know what they're talking about, they should leave the engineering talk to real engineers. The challenge for all of you is to figure out how to decipher fact from fiction and technical talk from sales talk. Anyone that has met us here at HRE, knows how we do business and our commitment to our team, partners, product and most of all our customers. It isn't just marketing BS here. It is simply how we operate. Let's also be very clear. I'm not saying we're perfect and we haven't struggled at times, but I think we'll all agree that HRE goes above and beyond to take care of any issues that do arise and our direction has always been to be moving forward; doing it the right way, doing it the hard way.

In the end, all you need to do is talk to us before you make up your mind about us. You'll find us refreshingly different.

Sincerely,

Alan Peltier
COO, HRE Performance Wheels

760-598-1960
alanp@hrewheels.com