Dear Drive… What are beadlock wheels and do I need them on my new Raptor?

Jason contacted our team and asked

Excellent question Jason, as beadlock wheels are not something we've seen too much of, outside aftermarket off-road specialists.

And to be clear, in the case of the new Ford Ranger Raptor, we are talking about beadlock 'capable' wheels.

To understand what a beadlock is, let's quickly understand what a bead is.

A bead is effectively the mating face between the tyre and the wheel. It is what keeps the tyre and the wheel connected together.

When you pump air into a tyre, that bead is held together by the pressure of the air inside. On the road, you generally have somewhere between 30 and 40 PSI of pressure in your tyres, which is lot of force keeping the wheel and tyre together.

But if you're going off-road and you are going to lower your tyre pressures, you might need to drop this down to 10 PSI to manage fairly hard terrain, rock crawling, sand, or thick mud. With lower pressure inside the tyre, you are reducing the force that is keeping the tyre and the wheel connected together.

In this instance, with pressures down low and if you are driving through sand and need to do a sharp turn, there is going to be a lot of force trying to push the tyre off the wheel, and in some cases you may 'break' the bead and strip the tyre from the wheel.

This means a whole lot of trouble and heartache trying to put it back together again!

The solution to managing these extreme situations is called a beadlock.

The most common type is a mechanical beadlock, which is the style available on the Raptor. This mechanically locks the outer bead of the tyre, on the face of the wheel, by using a special wheel design and a locking ring with a whole lot of bolts. This essentially clamps the tyre against the wheel.

The idea being, that even if you are running five PSI off-road, your tyres are super soft with nothing holding them on in terms of air pressure, you can drive hard off-road.

You've got a car with a big footprint and lots of grip, but because of that mechanical beadlock, all of the bolts in the wheel will hold the tyre onto the rim.

So you can go rock crawling. You can go driving through thick mud. You can do all sorts of cool things, and you're not going strip the tyre off the bead.

Yes! When used as described above, beadlock wheels can be very effective.

There's a downside though...

Yes and no.

The optional wheels on the Raptor ($2000 at the time of purchase or $4997 if purchased after the fact), are fitted with 'dress rings'. These look great and are perfectly legal, but they aren't actually locking rings.

To use the wheels properly, you need to buy locking rings from Ford ($1997) as an accessory. These are not legal to use on the road and can only be installed when driving off-road.

This means, between the blacktop and the mudbog, you need to remove your dress rings and fit your locking rings.

To keep count, that's 144 bolts. Yikes

In a word, no.

If you feel you simply need beadlock wheels, congratulations, because you're pushing your Raptor extremely hard off-road, and you're a lot braver than we are!

Think of beadlocked wheels as the off-road version of semi-slick tyres for your track car. They might be the ultimate in bragging rights, and do have the potential to improve performance, but the cold truth is: only a small percentage truly need them, and will be going hard enough to warrant their usage.

Look, we love the look of the wheels with the dress rings, but remember that as well as the $2000 premium over the standard rims, these are heavier (about 1.5kg per wheel) too.

We'd suggest keeping your $2k for some other accessories.

The car is a beast without them!

Have a question about your next set of wheels or just need some car advice? No query is too big, small or obscure! Call in to the radio show (Trent on 2GB Sydney 1:30pm Monday and 9:00pm Wednesday, 5AA South Australia 1:30pm Tuesday, and James on 3AW Melbourne 9:00pm each Thursday), or contact us by email here: contactus@drive.com.au.