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Photography by Alex Sobran
A T-shirt that says “No Fuchs Given” in capital letters down the front of it is preteen humor in car pun form. It would be funnier if it just spelled the naughty word out normally and kept a stylized rendering of the famous five-spoke wheel below it—like an Alibaba rip-off made by someone who doesn’t understand subtlety nor their Porsche pronunciations. On that note, some people say Porsche with emphasis on the “e” as the Germans would, while others are rooted in the American habit of keeping it silent. It doesn’t really matter—though many will happily send you rants suggesting otherwise—but it would be definitively poor decorum to pronounce Fuchs phonetically as an American.
Magnesium wheels made by Campagnolo can be found on just about any Italian supercar from the era that the term was birthed in, as well as cars competing in Formula 1 and on the world stages of rallying; RAYS has been the go-to brand for nearly every Japanese manufacturer in motorsport at one point or another; Speedline and Ferrari have been paired on roads and race tracks for decades; but it’s hard to think of any combination to rival the almost innate relationship between Porsche and Fuchs. Porsche pretty much brings the design out for special option packages nowadays, and they’ve probably mounted more BBSes to their cars than anything else since they raced on the first sets in the early 1970s, but if you ask anyone who knows enough to know what Fuchs and BBS are to tell you the wheels that go on a 911 it’s likely going to be the former. But they don’t just build 911s.
It makes sense that the two would leave a lasting impression; we can agree the 911 is a pretty “enduring” design, and so the wheels that appear on the definitive early models are too. The Fuchs wheels helped, in some way, to make those 901 and G-series 911s pop culture icons, and as such they’ve benefited by having the car’s still-growing wave of popularity rub off on the design of the wheel too. A Fuchs on an RSR race car with a huge barrel as wide as your head is objectively pretty cool, but so is a center-lock mag with a composite turbofan covering the gold-painted magnesium underneath. There are a lot more wheels for a Porsche than Fuchs, and they extend beyond BBS too. Minilites, Torque Thrusts, Jongbloeds, OZs, Speedlines, Compomotives, the list is long, and though I’m sure some good ones were missed, I hope you enjoy this gallery of wheels from last weekend’s Rennsport Reunion.
Hardly snobbery to have a forum where all civil discourse between car guys is encouraged. When criticism is offered in generalities it lacks defendable substance. A little known “fact” Otto Fuchs came from a long line of Fuchs. Now the company is a large conglomerate but they were the first in Germany to produce light alloy wheels. Lighten up “TRH”, for Herr Fuch’s sake. Nice article and pics Alex – keep them coming.