Blackstone Tek/BST Factory | Black Gold

Johannesburg, South Africa, is a city built on gold, where the world’s largest deposits of that precious metal were discovered in 1878 in the mile-high Witwatersrand reef. But today, there’s another kind of precious substance produced there by BlackStone Tek/BST. Founders Gary Turner and Ms. Terry Annecke mine the black gold represented by their company’s exquisite carbon fiber wheels, whose lightweight yet strong design can be found in both racing and street applications. These are the only carbon wheels in the world that are homologated for street use on motorcycles, approved by Germany’s tough TV standards, which includes checking for durability and protection against degradation by road salt or ultraviolet exposure. Since the company began production in 2002, more than 10,000 BST carbon wheels have been built. Fitted with CNC-machined billet aluminum hubs via a patented process in its purpose-built 4900-square-meter factory by a 30-person workforce, BST’s products are sold all over the world, with a pair of carbon wheels fitted with standard bearings retailing for $3750 per front and rear, or $4000 per set with ceramic bearings. But the firm’s race-quality wheels are now also used by a steadily increasing number of discerning motorcycle racing teams.

However, BST wheels aren’t just eye candy. Carbon fiber wheels are the best bolt-on performance product you can purchase for your motorcycle, says former roadracer Gary Turner, 44, the designer of BlackStone Tek’s iconic products. They don’t just look nice, but you also get an instant improvement in performance, and it’s something the rider feels immediately. This instant gratification comes becausealongside its better-known benefits in handling and suspension compliancea BST carbon wheel’s much lighter rim helps deliver better acceleration and braking by reducing the rotational moment of inertia.

BST wheels will save anything between 40-60 percent in unsprung weight, depending on their size, says Turner. But more importantly, they have much lighter rims, and carry the bulk of their weight in the metal hub. The hub has far less effect on the performance of the wheel than the rim, because of what amounts to a flywheel effect. The further the mass represented by the weight of the rim is located away from the rotating axis, the more energy it takes to accelerate it. And that energy comes directly from the bike’s engine, which is why our carbon wheels with a much lighter rim than any conventional metal wheel, even a forged magnesium one, effectively improve engine performance via easier, faster acceleration. BST claims that a standard set of 17-inch cast aluminum wheels fitted to a Yamaha R1 or Honda CBR1000RR streetbike weigh a total of 22 poundssplit 7.7 pounds for the 3.5-inch front, and 14.3 pounds for the 6.0-inch rearwhile a set of its carbon race wheels by contrast scales in at 11 pounds (4.6 pounds for the front, and 6.4 pounds for the rear). Halving the unsprung weight is already impressive, but because the bulk of that saving comes from the wheel’s rim and spokes, there’s an even greater saving in rotational inertia according to Turner, who claims that this is the equivalent of a five-horsepower increase when accelerating the wheels from zero to 124 mph. I discovered a dramatic drop in lap times when acting as the development rider for British wheel manufacturer Dymag in the 90s, racing that company’s prototype carbon fiber wheels before it went out of business. Just adding the carbon wheels dropped more than one second a lap on a 2.5-mile circuit on the same day with no other mechanical improvements to the motorcycle.

Back in the mid-90s Turner was living in the Netherlands and racing one of his two Ducati Supermono singles in the hotly contested European Supermono Championship run as a World Superbike support class. Carbon fiber had recently started appearing on factory Superbikes, and I was helping pay for my racing by running a company called Pro Carbon, which basically manufactured and sold many different carbon fiber parts to Joe Average, recalls Turner. I hadn’t yet got round to making a wheel. But then you showed up with the prototype Dymag carbon wheels on your Ducati Supermono, and that got me thinking. The Japanese maxi-singles like the Over Yamaha and BMR Suzuki were getting punched out to 750cc and more, and our 578cc Ducatis were struggling to keep up. So I thought, Well, we’ve got to get a bit more juice out of the bike,’ and so I took to developing the carbon wheels as a way of reducing the rotational inertia, which helped improve acceleration and countered the extra torque those big singles had over us exiting a turn. So that’s how we got started.