Square rollers

There are a few things I love about Giugiaro’s Italdesign beyond the well-known wedgy concepts and somewhat interesting production cars (like a personal favorite, the first-generation Lexus GS, once dismissed as lackluster compared to its successor but growing more aesthetically interesting over time in its own right). There are the Aliens watches, the numerous non-automotive consumer products which deserve their own exploration, and the wheels.

Not tires, but wheels. Sure, Vredestein and Italdesign have been producing “Giugiaro Design” cosigned tires for a while, but during the height of the magnesium/multipiece craze Italdesign collaborated with the Japanese wing of the Italian wheel brand Melber to produce the Scacchiera and its successors.

Scacchiera means “chess board,” and the wheels were designed for the Asso di Quadri concept car for BMW built on E21 mechanicals. The idea was to obscure the lug nuts, which Giugiaro considered unsightly, by nesting them in the junctions of the intersecting grooves in the wheel. The Scacchiera II and the other wheels in the Italdesign/Melber series hid the lug nuts behind plastic caps, which also made five-lug wheels in this design practicable. 

In my opinion, while the Scacchiera are interesting and eye-catching, and must have influenced Italdesign’s later Piazza/Impulse wheels, it’s the gold-hued Trama that is the stand-out. It has all of the perpendicular appeal of the Scacchiera but there’s more depth, more detail. Look how the “fill” between the strakes falls away as it reaches the inner rim, to blend in, while the thinner strakes continue to almost the outer lip, standing just proud of the outer rim. 

And it wouldn’t be a mid-1980s design without a little bit of asymmetry. Look at the Giugiaro signature, sitting on an almost flush plate with a couple of colorful intersecting stripes. Compare it to Giugiaro-designed Seiko Prospex 7C43-7A00 from 1986, and you can see some thematic parallels. The textures, the asymmetry, the color of course. The contemporary Seikos that have a gold tone to them—this Prospex reference, but also the gold-dialed titanium 7C43 models—are often overshadowed by the much wilder and more famous Bishop and Ripley, but maybe they shouldn’t be overlooked.

So too for the Melber wheels, which wouldn’t look out of place in reinterpreted form on the Hyundai N74 Concept. Perhaps they’d look better than the (admittedly cool) turbofan-esque wheels on that concept. Maybe, if that on-again, off-again car gets a final greenlight, someone responsible for wheel design at Hyundai’s excellent design team will have the Trama on their mood board.