If there’s been one big style trend in high-end performance cars over the past decade or so, it’s center lock wheels, re-popularized by Porsche. Not only does it theoretically reduce the number of fasteners on a car, it also adds a healthy dose of race car style for the street. Theoretically, it also distills fastener issues down to a single point of failure. Well, theory has just been put into practice, because Porsche has recalled a batch of defective center lock fasteners, the failure of which could spell disaster for high-end German sports car owners.
As you’d probably expect for a single fastener used to hold an entire wheel on, the tightening procedure for Porsche’s center locks is nothing short of insane. You’re supposed to torque the center lock fastener to a whopping 443 ft.-lbs., back the fastener off by 60 degrees, torque it again to 443 ft.-lbs., back it off by 60 degrees again, then torque it once again to 443 ft.-lbs. Oh, and this all has to happen with the wheel still in the air and with the brake pedal depressed. For context, the torque spec for a regular lug bolt on a standard brand-new 911 is 118 ft.-lbs.
Now, most torque wrenches simply aren’t good for 443 ft.-lbs. of torque, which means buying a special tool, and don’t forget the special adapter to fit the Porsche-specific fasteners. Some owners who torque their own center locks love the HYTORC center lock electric torque wrench, and while it seems like a nifty automated solution, it also retails for $4,995. Yeah, nearly $5,000. It’s a lot cheaper to buy a 3/4-inch click-type torque wrench for a few hundred dollars and a Porsche-specific socket for a hundred or two more, but you still need a buddy to keep their foot on the brakes.
Of course, all that torque is only good if the fastener can handle it, but not all of them can. In fact, Porsche’s just recalled 1,851 911, 718 Spyder RS, and 718 GT4 RS models built for the 2024 model year due to center lock fasteners that may fracture, allowing for loose wheels, so if you own a potentially affected vehicle, you might want to park it until Porsche can take a look at it.
According to the recall document, the affected batch of fasteners was installed on 2024 Porsche 911s built between Sept. 13, 2023 and Oct. 21, 2024, along with 718 Spyder RS and GT4 RS models built between Oct. 24, 2023 and April 2, 2024. The problem is that although VIN ranges are given, the allegedly defective parts weren’t installed on sequentially produced vehicles, so it’s a bit of a crapshoot as to which vehicles are affected.
You’d expect a defect like this to rear its ugly head rather quickly, and you’d be right. The recall document states that “Between September and mid-Oct., 2024, Porsche became aware of several incidents attributable to center lock fractures.” Translation? It’s quite likely some wheels at least started to fall off. Considering Porsche often specs center lock hardware on cars usually optioned or equipped as standard with expensive carbon ceramic brakes, a wheel falling off could be one seriously pricey proposition, but retaining nubs should theoretically stop a loose center lock from winding all the way off. Will they stop a fractured one from falling off? That’s harder to answer, but considering Porsche has recommended not driving affected vehicles, finding out doesn’t sound fun.
In any case, owners will soon be contacted by Porsche, but in the meantime, it might be worth parking your toy if it falls in the range of affected vehicles. Better safe than sorry, right? While center locks are cool, securing something as important as a wheel to a vehicle using a single fastener can be dicey if quality control slips.
(Photo credits: Porsche)
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Not the first time, though my current cars are unaffected this time.
In 2010 I was at the Nürbirgring with a new 997.2 GT3RS and I had asked Sabine Schmitz to drive it . She refused ,saying that she ws concerned about the centre locks. A wheel had some off a car there recently, so she wanted to have her mechanic take a look at my car before she drove it. As it happened the car was OK and she drove without incident.
There was no recall at that time, and when the car shipped back to Canada I asked the dealer about the recall.
Still nothing.
About three months later there was a full recall for all of the 7.2RS and they replaced the hubs and locknuts. Further they had some wear restrictions for track use. No idea how rare the failures were.
The centre locks look OK but there is no real function as the cars have no spare wheels. Thus a flat that cannot be plugged with gunk mean a flatbed anyway. Understand the need for full race cars as they are very quick change, but most RS just do trackdays and are not full race cars.
Did you get to ride along with her?
German Engineering strikes again.
I’m not seeing the upside to having a single lug nut on a personal vehicle. If it’s for aesthetics, you can barely tell it’s a center lock wheel (as opposed to standard) anyways so who even cares? If its for bragging rights, again, who even cares?
Replacing a single wheel on a car should not be a 2 person job requiring $1,000-$5,000 in special tools. That’s not “cool”, that’s just annoying.
Especially when the only practical benefit of a centre-lock is to make it easier to change tires (during a race), having one that makes it more complicated is particularly ironic.
Things Fall Apart;
The Centre Cannot Hold
Maybe the next logical step is to change to vaguely center lock-looking fake designs (with lug nuts), like some of the weird aftermarket wheels of the past. Would the owners know or care? Retro! Cool! Expensive!
Wait, Porsche, on the $300k car, hasn’t figured out a better way to keep the wheels from turning than to have a guy step on the brake pedal? They don’t have a lockup mode on the electronic parking brake that can be activated with a $2800 dealer scanner, or a $700 Porsche-branded special wheel chock?
I think with all the recalls on these seriously expensive vehicles, anything new, the manufacturer should not only be required to fix it free but provide a free loaner until it is repaired.
Must be the same nuts from Valtteri Bottas’ car.
Porsche making sure its customers are adhering to No Nut November.
I’ll stick with my lug bolts 🙂
My 1956 Lotus Eleven race car has knock off center hub nuts. The torque settings are “whack with lead hammer until the nut moves less than 1/4″, then apply 3 more whacks”. I suspect this is substantially less than 400 ft-lbs.
Most cars racing at Le Mans in the 50s and 60s had this design because it was faster to remove/replace only a single nut and it is harder to lose a big old shiny thing during a frantic night pitstop.
While I have had a hub failure, the aluminum nut has always been bulletproof. You do have to lubricate and inspect the threads on both the hub and nut for wear and replace occasionally. Leave it to Porsche to screw up 70 year old technology.
It’s interesting how NASCAR moved to this a few years ago (along with alloy wheels), and there’s still way more wheels coming off on track than in the old-school lug nut days. So faster, sure, but seemingly with some downside.
The weight of these things can’t be helping here, either. One of the things I like about Leno is he doesn’t go for this kind of track car version of tactical grade crap. He’s told the story a million times about how he didn’t go for the carbon brakes on his McLaren because he could never make use of it and it saved him $20k or something, plus more expensive maintenance (I also love that he still thinks about the cost).
I was doing a DE at Barber the weekend the stop-use order was issued.
It’s always super heavy with Porsche GT cars. Based upon the overheard scuttlebutt, the highest concentration of those 1900 cars was probably sitting in that paddock. They ended up with 1/2 a weekend left of track time they couldn’t (chose not to) use.
I thought the switch to center locks was stupid years ago with the GT cars. Then with the 991 even the GTS came with center locks. Have a buddy with a GTS and another with a Touring. He just shrugs but they would bother the hell out of me. I can do my HPDE side to side swap in 15 minutes by myself with no fancy equipment.
Oh, the tribulations of owning a rich man’s toy.
Yup. Makes you wanna just bust out cryin’.
Center Locks were made for race cars that are going to be driven a few hundred miles with frequent changes – Not for cars which are going to be driven thousands of miles with no changes.
It’s like equipping a 737 with afterburners and a tailhook.
When I was younger, I’d scoff at ads talking about “race inspired” parts/features, b/c that usually meant putting a tape stripe on and calling it high performance. But now, I’m nearly equally unimpressed by stuff like this, putting actual race stuff on street cars that have no need for it, or like in this case, are actually endangered by it.
It goes along with my general annoyance at the use of “pro” on every other thing pitched to us these days. We can’t just have amateur stuff for the 99 out of 100 or so activities in which we’re amateurs?
Blame nerds. When electronics was still a nerd thing all the nerds wanted the industrial level stuff because the actual consumer grade equipment sucked. And as the cheapening of manufacturing continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s industrial level stuff that had to go through multiple levels of testing resisted that cheapening. The nerds told all the non-nerds “Buy this and not that because Cisco/AT&T/IBM uses this and they run for years without stopping,” to which the non-nerds learned the wrong things — that being, anything branded “pro” was the best to get, rather than anything that had passed endurance and reliability testing was the thing to get. After a few years (and after the Dot Com bubble had burst) that spilled over into everything else. Now you had “pro” grade coffee makers, MP3 players, mops, socket wrenches, sewing machines, hair dryers, meat dehydrators… Anything where they could add stupid extraneous features and charge a premium. Meanwhile the actual professional grade industrial equipment a lot of times is the most stupidly simple version strengthened to suffer years of neglect and active abuse sold at a high price because there are very few people who actually need it.
Fascinating – thank you for sharing that!
I’m just amazed at how the “pro” designation is now used on stuff that’s so far afield from equipment someone doing a job for money would specifically need. The worst has to be iPhones; whenever I hear Apple go on about the “iPhone Pro”, I always wonder if it means social media influencers.
That’s the stuff the newer generation of nerds (or “nerds”, they don’t truly know anything but someone else’s opinion, but they are passionate about the other person’s thoughts they’ve adopted and are socially awkward) refers to as luddite for the lack of (worthless) features and newest (disposable) tech. Another meaningless marketing term now is tactical grade. Take a Chinese budget item, stick a number of useless “survival” features that compromise its actual usefulness to stack the ad copy, cover the original knockoff Hello Kitty branding up with a camo pattern, and sell it to self-styled “alphas” alongside angry face Jeep accessories. Today’s nerds and alphas aren’t far apart.
“Meanwhile the actual professional grade industrial equipment a lot of times is the most stupidly simple version strengthened to suffer years of neglect and active abuse sold at a high price because there are very few people who actually need it.”
+1.
Now having said that, in some cases, it’s worth getting something in heavy duty commercial grade if it’s something you use a lot and all the consumer grade stuff has a shitty warranty.
For example… I bought a dryer recently… A Heubsch dryer (same company that makes Speed Queen… maker of commercial grade washers and dryers used in laundrymats).
My dryer cost $500 more and has fewer features than then next ‘best’ dryer with way more features.
But I picked it because it was the only one with a 5 year warranty. All the other ones I read about had shitty 1 year warranties… and a good number of reviews where people said they shit the bed not long after the warranty expired.
And I don’t care about stupid features like having my dryer connect to my wifi. I just need it to dry my clothes properly and last a long time as getting appliances in and out of my basement is a pain.
So my dryer is new but looks old school.
But it works and actually dries my clothes faster than my previous consumer-grade dryer that died. And the thing is build solid and I expect it will last me well over decade before it needs replacing… just like the old-school appliances our parents bought.
And I bet, outside of this, you don’t go around talking about your dryer. You really value it for what it does, not what it is.
Whereas it seems like what a lot of buyers of “pro” equipment of whatever really want is visual signifiers, badging that say PRO, etc. like you point out above.
Oh, this is relevant to my interests. I will likely be in the market soon, and most dryers are tin shitcans where I can imagine pulling damp towels out just looking at the display model, or elaborate fanciful objects of glass and steel with an Internet connection and the (untoggleable ability to play) two minutes of classical music like a 1997 ringtone every time it’s proud enough to have finished a cycle, at which point I know it’s time to pull my damp towels out and start another cycle.
Competing on the basis of functional superiority has long since taken the third row compared to
“it plays Für Elise and can send you a notification in the connected app!*
*Your data has already been both sold and stolen”
“When I was younger, I’d scoff at ads talking about “race inspired” parts/features, b/c that usually meant putting a tape stripe on and calling it high performance.”
It’s a similar deal with “tactical” and “military grade” stuff… but instead of a tape stripe, it’s a matte beige, green or camo finish.
Why have only one Jesus nut when you can have 4!
Gotta love German engineering.
If you only got one but is a cotter pin too much to ask?
Damn! That’s a pretty complex protocol for a single wheel!
Do the Porsche wrenches have an automatic tighten, retract 60°, then tighten setting?
They’ll add a surcharge for auto-demounting wheels.
It’s mid corner self-lightening!