This is a 100 page long thread so far, so I'm going to assume I'm not the first person to ask this, but has there been any discussion about custom wheels having an effect on handling? Feel free to skip to the section labelled as important.
It's difficult for me to prove by myself so would really appreciate the thoughts of anyone else who has played around with custom wheels, but I spent quite a bit of time playing around with the 2000GT-R yesterday and I'm pretty confident that there is a small but distinct difference in handling when switching between stock rims and custom rims.
Forgive me for going a bit in depth with this, but since we first had that daily race at Deep Forest with 295bhp/1200KG restrictions, I have been tuning all sorts of cars to those restrictions so I can time trial them around Deep Forest, a fun way to see how even with identical BHP and weight figures, the cars and lap times can be significantly different. Doing this is how I first noticed some weird things going on with certain cars, specifically older cars that I'd purchased from the Legends dealership.
I don't know if anyone else has seen this happen, but I tried taking the Mangusta (with racing brakes - just like every other car I've done this with) round Deep Forest, and at certain suspension setups, the braking performance is atrocious, like 20-30 metres longer at the end of each straight. I probably wouldn't have noticed this anywhere else, but at this point I've done several hundred laps with cars that all reach roughly the same speed, before I've even taken a car out I know basically where the braking point is going to be, give or take 5 metres. As a result it was extremely obvious to me that something was wrong. I tried changing all sorts of things and couldn't really make sense of it. Not only that but it's handling was so bad in low speed corners, so much understeer.
I then noticed a similar thing with the 2000GT-R yesterday, significantly longer braking distance while using the stock wheels. Again, couldn't really make sense of it, decided to change to custom rims for unrelated reasons, and immediately noticed a difference even though I hadn't changed anything else, it was suddenly back to normal. But here's the thing! I tried changing back to stock wheels and suddenly, I no longer had the braking problem with those rims either! Feeling very confused I decided to play around and see if I could notice any differences.
The important part (feel free to skip the above if you cba): I am confident that custom wheels bring handling differences to cars, even though I don't think I've seen any changes in PP rating. The two main differences I have observed have been a change in behaviour in corners, and a significant difference in rumble feedback in all areas of the track. I observed these differences with the 2000GT-R (which had been tuned to 295bhp/1200kg with wide body + aero mods, on sports hard tyres), which by default has 14-inch rims, so quite small relative to moderns cars, I think it can be bumped up to 18-inch with custom rims?
First, the handling behaviour: The difference is very subtle but if you drive 10 laps on default 14-inch rims and then do 10 laps of custom 18-inch + wide rims + wide offset wheels, you will notice the difference in the first corner - the custom wheels feel more settled throughout the corner, it feels much quicker to settle into the corner on turn in and overall corners are a smoother experience. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what is different but the easiest way to describe it is that the tyre feels stiffer, which makes sense. It doesn't feel like I have more grip, but the difference in handling was resulting consistently in slightly faster laptimes, something like half a second on average with 1:45 lap-times.
Secondly, rumble feedback: This one is pretty simple, on the standard rims there is significantly more rumble feedback than there is on larger rims with wide rims and wide offset. I wasn't expecting this change but again this was noticeable within 5 seconds of driving the different rims back to back, it's much more obvious than the change in handling. Not much else to say about this, it really is as simple as there being more feedback all over the track.
Is anyone else able to provide some thoughts or some of their own observations to the above? I am 100% confident that there was a difference in rumble feedback, I'm wary about the handling differences though. I feel like it could just be a placebo but at the same time, I did 10 laps with custom rims, then 10 laps of standard rims, and then 10 laps of custom again, and I was consistently faster with custom rims.
Also has anyone else noticed unexplained and unusual differences in braking performance on certain cars?
. it still bites when you're not smooth with your input though but manageable enough not to ruin your race, now my FD keeps up with the big guys in R34, R33, R32, and NA2.
) differences too.
