I have 18 inch HRE 447R's that are perfectly balanced and all the tires have the correct tire pressures.

Yesterday on the highway during a heavy rain fall my car developed a very strange and weird front end wobble. I cannot explain this in any other way other than to say it was a very violent and was ofcourse very noticeable in the steering wheel. This only occurred between 60 and 70 MPH.

Below 60 MHP, the car was perfectly fine. Is it remotely possible that lots of water was trapped in the inner barrel of the wheel(s) by centrifugal forces and was causing the wheel to become unbalanced and cause this violent shaking?

I can't think of any other reasonable explanation. The wheel locks are on on firmly, the wheels were balanced recently. This has only occurred the one time and that was only during the heavy rainfall. When the roads are dry the car does not exhibit this behaviour.

Any insights, anyone?

 

it's a common problem on a lot of wheels, that's coz' of teh design, causing a little channel in the middle of the wheel and that trap water. so when you go at certain speed, the water start to kick the balance of the wheels off and you get the extremely bad shake.

my old 19s volks had it, and now my 20s hre also has it. there is nothing wrong

i think on my 19s volks the shaking started at about 70mph, same with my hre

 

Hameed, this is NORMAL. This has happened to me, and also happened recently to DaveGS4 while driving to my home and I had to tell him to chill because his car wasn't falling apart!

When raining, the HREs can trap an amount of water inside the rim which becomes a big 'rotating weight' that causes it to be seriously out of balance. The trick to stop the vibration is to pull over and either let the water fall out before proceeeding SLOWLY accelerating maybe turning left/right to shake the water out, or literally use a cloth to wipe it out before proceeding.

So don't panic my friend!

 

So I am not the only one with this problem! My 847R's did this 3 months ago on my way down to DC in pouring rain. It was crazy, I actually stopped and got out in the pouring rain to inspect the wheels to make sure the lug nuts had not fallen off it was that bad IMO. Well at least I know when it pours to stay at 60MPH or so, or deal with the feeling of the front end falling off.

 

i also tried to went all the way to 80+mph and it helped a bit too

slowing down to 60mph will help, but as soon as you get back to around 70mph (in my case) the problem is back)

 

All 3-piece wheels have this problem. When I had my RH C5's, I had the same problem too. If you use 2-piece or single piece wheels, it's no longer a problem any more That's why I switched to CA-05

 

My SSR GT3's do it also. It started when I first got my 19's I thought is was the P-zeros, but after switching to pilot sport A/S it still does it in the rain but it is not as bad.

 

ive also had this problem and it went away for a while when i used the hunter road force analyst machine. But a year later the problem is back. if u search for HUNTER i wrote an old thread on it. good luck with the problem!

tony

 

The problem with trapped water can't be solved by any balancing system including the awesome Hunter machine.

 

It only started to rain here in the last couple of weeks so I have not have this happened yet. I'm sure it will with the 20s. I never had this problem with the 18s since the inside construction was different. I did notice the pooling of water when I wash the car though. There is an extra step to clear that trapped water when washing the car now.

 

Yeah, I called Bit on the drive down to NOPI in heavy rain asking 'where is the wheel place you use, all my wheel weights have come off'. VERY disconcerting feeling. Guy following me on the hill of an offramp said when I stopped it was like somebody dumped a gallon of water. I pulled into McD's and took a few dozen napkins which helped for a while. You really need to slow down/stop and spin the water out.

At 60mph or so the car is nearly undriveable. Luckily I don't drive the GS in rain much.

 

Based on all your replies I am very dissappointed with this problem because I cannot "fix" it.

What I don't understand is how a high-end custom wheel manufacturer like HRE or any other custom wheel manufacturer has not figured out a resolution for this issue............................

Even DaveGS4's newer design 840R's (at least I think they are a newer design) have the same problem.....

 

Yeah, I've had this problem ever since I got the Volk AV-3s. Unfortunately it is a little more difficult to avoid the rain here. Besides I don't always feel like driving the "other" car.

 

honestly hameed, i totally disagree with you. i don'tt hink it's a problem with HRE. if it's a inherent design problem with 3 piece wheels (as stated by jacob) for whatever reason (which i would love to know as well), then there is nothing hre can do unless there is a revolutionary solution to the problem. don't blame hre, blame the 3 piece design for that matter

and looking from this thread, it seems like a lot of other brands 3 piece wheels have this problem

and yes, when the car shakes bad, it's almost undrivable. i am serious, what i did was just punch the car even harder to higher speed and the shaking started to go away

 

I still disagree that this is a problem with 3-piece wheels that we all have to live with indefinitely.

I am not knocking HRE or any other wheel manufacturer. What I am trying to say is that it does not make sense to me that the wheel companies don't do some R&D on this issue and come up with some "revolutionary" fix for the issue. Perhaps they already have and have not figured out how to resolve it. I don't know.

Nothing is impossible and I don't wish to live with this problem. (assuming I will change my wheels in the future to some wheels that have the problem fixed).

This problem is so bad and disconcerting that the car is not safe to be driven when this happens.