Rocket Racing Wheels is a brand of “high-performance, nostalgia-inspired wheels for both classic and modern muscle cars, hot rods, street rods,and classic trucks” put out by Rocket Performance Machine, Inc. (RPM), a CNC/Milling shop in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Rocket's wheels have very quickly earned a lot of, well, “street cred” for making some very tough and beautiful wheels as well as for offering easy fitment options.

Company:

Rocket's fitment options are essentially built into the business plan, as RPM explains:

“As each Rocket Racing Wheel comes to market, the backspacing and offsets will be carefully chosen and proven to fit on more specific types of muscle car, street rod, hot rod, and even some classic pickups. This will give enthusiasts the ability to pick a perfectly sized set of wheels without breaking the bank or waiting weeks or months for the finished product.”

So instead of offering the customer a blizzard of offsets and bolt patterns to wade through, Rocket builds their wheels in multiple specs that offer fitment options for a wide range of makes and models. That's a model that makes a lot of sense for the vintage car niche, and seems to make Rocket's customer's lives a lot easier.

Rocket sells through distributors, so their website only offers finish and fitment options for their catalog of wheels. Despite that, Rocket's website is informative and easy to use. The catalog is well organized and makes it simple to browse multiple looks or quickly find the one wheel you're looking for.

The items come up with good descriptions and an excellent selection of possible fitments and suggested accessories like hub-centric rings, complete with prices. Some even have links to car pics featuring the wheels installed.

The Customer Service section is a bit light on useful content, but offers a superb guide to various measurements needed for proper fitments. Some explanations of those various measurements, like offset, bolt pattern and hub diameter would probably go well there.

Construction:

Rocket sells only cast-alloy wheels. They note that, “Rocket Racing Wheels are precision crafted from A356 aluminum and are designed and tested to meet or exceed U.S. D.O.T. requirements and SAE standard[s] resulting in strong, lightweight and precision-engineered products. “

Finishes:

Rocket Racing Wheels come in a number of the usual finishes, and a few that are pretty unique.

• Painted/Machined finishes are often my favorite type. Also known as “flange-cut” this finish is achieved by painting the whole wheel and then machine-polishing the outer edge for a bright contrast to the paint color.
• Unlike vintage polished finishes, nearly every modern polish has a protective clearcoat over it so you don't have to wax them every week anymore.
• “Chrome is like a supermodel; beautiful but high-maintenance.”
• Hypersilver is new enough that it never graced the original vintage wheels that Rocket evokes. But the deep metallic glow of the hypersilver finish looks really good on these designs.
• Rocket also adapts the flange-cutting process to hypersilver to produce their “Hyper-shot” finish, with a smoked hypersilver on the inner piece and a machined outer edge.
• Rocket's As Cast finish is a unique textured powdercoat that makes the wheel look unfinished.
• There's also Rocket's latest special finish RPM-7, a high-fidelity copy of the famous Dow-7 coating for magnesium wheels. Any of Rocket's wheels can be customized with the RPM-7 powdercoating process.