Imports
- Thread starter Puffy
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- P_Balance
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If only it had some proper wheels and tires...
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CodeRedR51
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I want one of those.
Lots of Subies in my town. The guy that runs the local Machine shop has a '94 Impreza sedan, base model. Totally stock on the outside, built JDM motor under the hood. Only been to the track once this year, but ran a 12.0 @ 123mph WITH a slipping clutch that ended his night. Thing is a beast.
Lots of Subies in my town. The guy that runs the local Machine shop has a '94 Impreza sedan, base model. Totally stock on the outside, built JDM motor under the hood. Only been to the track once this year, but ran a 12.0 @ 123mph WITH a slipping clutch that ended his night. Thing is a beast.
- 5,428
- Midship_Express
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Those are proper wheels and tyres. Guarantee that on something like that any other wheel/tyre combo would ruin the handling/ride compromise.
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I cant remember the last time I heard someone say this
I say it all the time.
The best wheels for a car are the ones that the manufacturer designed the suspension to work with (if the manufacturer is competent). Bigger wheels and tires only work because of the stiffer sidewall and the grippier compounds that you can buy for low-profile tires... but give a car bigger wheels with the exact same tire type as before, and it won't perform any better than stock (once you've pumped the stockers up to prevent sidewall deformation).
And bigger wheels with bigger offsets affect your scrub radius... usually to the detriment of handling... unless you can adjust for this by tweaking the suspension geometry.
In racing, the best wheels and tires are the smallest wheels you can fit around your brakes, wrapped in the widest tires that won't cause geometry issues.
- 5,303
- Riverside, Ca
- GTP_Leonidae_MFT
I need the address of that 7 and Z.. So that I can steal them! 
Keef
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- 25,192
- Dayton, OH
- GTP_KeefRacer
- GTP Keef
Pumping up crappy all-season tires only helps deformation so much. Either way they're soft, and when used with a stiff suspension the tire becomes the spring, then ruining the ride/handling compromise. I'm no tire engineer but I know all tires bounce and vibrate and whatnot at their own frequency and manufacturers have to consider that vibration, trying to choose one that complements the factory spring rates for a smooth, quiet ride. Of course I'm assuming the car has stiffer than stock suspension, otherwise the thing would ride around like my RX, a new-for-1991 1955 Buick.
Also, reducing unsprung weight will improve ride quality, especially over big bumps like expansion joints because the suspension will have it easier keeping the tire on the ground, instead of trying to wrangle the oscillations of a heavier package.
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Not by a long shot. Unless you have something like an Elise or a super car that don't come with 6 in wide wheels and tires from the factory, there is always room for plenty of improvement.
Wider and lighter wheels with tires will allow you to fit a better tire. I really don't want to get into the advantages of having a much lighter wheel and a wider and more "adhesive" tire compound as I'm sure everyone here is competent enough to understand them.
Maybe you were unable to properly transfer your thoughts on to the keyboard due to being sleepy/tired. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But how in the world do you manage to fit a tire from one size wheel (both in diameter and width) to another one? Even if the other wheel was the same diameter but just wider, you'd still be stretching a stock tire, not making the contact patch any wider. Then as you said, pump it up to "prevent" sidewall deformation? To what? 40 psi Wider wheels only effect your scrub radius when their offset is the same as the narrower wheel. And the scrub radius changing is detrimental to performance in the sense of feel, not actual cornering speeds. And I mean "feel" as in, like in my car (NA Miata,) where road imperfections will tend to pull the wheels to follow them. Keep in mind this is with no power steering, 320mm Momo steering wheel, and R888s (I have 15x7 +20 offset Weds.) When I ever go driving on roads outside the city this doesn't happen. Not that it is ever much of a problem through the uneven road through town anyways.
In racing the best wheels are the smallest you can fit around the brakes and the widest necessary to fit the widest tires allowed by the regulations. You're confusing association with causation. Getting wider tires wont change the scrub radius. Changing the wheels offset, and thus its distance relative to any point in the cars body, will.
Getting a one or two inch larger wheel in diameter compared to stock is usually the way to go (depending on the car.) It will allow you to fit a better tire size (lower profile) and larger brakes. Logically, getting the widest wheel you could conveniently fit to allow for a wider tire without having to stretch is the way to go. Then you chose an offset that will allow for a flush fitment.
Also, most race car's wheels have very low offset and it is very unlikely the engineers design anything into the suspension geometry to account for the steering effect since it's simply not significant enough in a car with power steering (or even my car without it.) Cars such as in BTCC/WTCC all have relatively low offset wheels all to clear the calipers. The same is true in WRC cars with the wheels they use for tarmac.
Let me mention I'm also fully aware that, more often than not, a wider and slightly larger in diameter wheel (although by itself can be lighter than stock) will be heavier due to the larger tires. Nevertheless the benefits will outweigh the disadvantages, given a good, lightweight wheel.
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What.
The.
Hell.
No more engineering talk for you, period.
The dampers address all oscillations in ride quality, and while tires do deform and vibrate, this is part of what balancing is designed to address. Heavier wheels and tires versus lighter ones wont' make much of a different, if any, on ride quality due to the 20 pounds at best difference being trivial to the loading induced by the spring, unless the car has no where near enough suspension travel for normal driving.
And no one is going to put some tall profile, tread ware 400 tires on a car that has been stiffened. The big deformation issue on "normal" tires is the weaker sidewall leading to rolling of the tire during aggressive cornering, and that is addressed by over inflating the tire. Talking 45 psi versus 30 normally.
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That, very obviously, depends on what you're looking for. As with the Legacy I mentioned, it depends on the compromise between ride and handling that you're after.
Living in the States, you really haven't experienced the near third-world levels of crappy tarmac we get in the UK, but trust me - you can go quicker on the road here in a car with a softer setup than you can with the "optimum" setup, simply because a little compliance will let you ride the bumps far more easily. I'm damn sure I could get around town quicker in my old 60bhp Fiesta than I can in my Miata with double the power, simply because the Fiesta could clear the ripples and bumps with a shrug where the Mazda is rattled to hell and back. Smaller wheels with taller tyres and more give in the sidewalls are worth their weight in gold.
I expect it's the same for Niky, living in the Philippines. A ride/handling balance is much more important than outright grip, unless your roads are like a billiards table.
Though the Elise you mention is a particular exception. A hardcore sports car with a ride better than 90% of the cars on the road, because it's dampers have been tuned so perfectly as the light weight allows a stiff yet compliant setup.
The Elise is literally the perfect sports car for UK roads - fantastic ride, yet handling to better anything this side of a Ferrari 458.
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Um, you do realize, living in the US, many of the roads are maintained by the state, and we have a hell of a lot more roads than the UK does, many of which are in an absolutely joke of a state, so don't try to make it sound like we don't know what bad roads are.
- 8,480
- P_Balance
The solution? Ohlins coilovers like the ones on his Miata.
His point still stands, there is always room for improvement.
EDIT: And yes, we have bad roads. Recently I drove across the state to go the beach, and a lot of the roads felt smoother driving at 70mph than they did at 35 (during a traffic jam) because the car simply skips over everything.
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Whats this?
Oh hai thar LS6
Oh hai thar LS6
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Um, do you realize, living in the UK, many of the roads aren't maintained at all*, and we have to make to with the crappy roads we have, most of which are in an absolutely [sic] joke of a state, so don't try to make it sound like we don't have roads as bad as we do.
*and when they are, you can guarantee some bugger will dig it up again to install a water pipe or cable TV that should have been done when the road was resurfaced...
- 10,620
- gtp_jimprower
Unless you've driven down a road 15 miles from anywhere with potholes as large as the car itsself, I may not believe you.
- 8,480
- P_Balance
He's not trying to say that you don't have roads as bad as you do, he's saying that we have roads just as bad, and worse than you do.
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He'd have to have sampled at least some of them over here then, right? Seriously, some of our major routes are less comfortable to drive on than the grass-growing-through-seventy-year-old-concrete sections of Route 66 I drove on a few years back. There's a reason why car manufacturers wanting to sell stuff in the UK do some of their development here to make sure you don't shake out your eyeballs on some of our country roads.
Regardless, I don't see what part of my original point doesn't still stand: that on bad roads you can go a lot quicker in a car with some suppleness. Is that not just common sense?
Edit: Also, apologies for the over-confrontationalness (yay, new word). Drunk last night, hungover this morning. Normal service will be resumed soon.
In the meantime, an interesting Insight...
Regardless, I don't see what part of my original point doesn't still stand: that on bad roads you can go a lot quicker in a car with some suppleness. Is that not just common sense?
Edit: Also, apologies for the over-confrontationalness (yay, new word). Drunk last night, hungover this morning. Normal service will be resumed soon.
In the meantime, an interesting Insight...
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- 23,800
- Philippines
There is... but improvements have to be made all-together... not just by slapping bigger wheels and wider tires without any other changes.
True.
I meant what I said. Go up a size, down in profile and fit the exact same model and tire compound (ergo: from crappy Eagle 205-55-16 NCT5s to bigger 205-50-17 Eagle NCT5s) and you get bumpkis in handling improvement... or merely the same improvement you'd get from pumping up the old tires to prevent sidewall deformation. Granted, if the tire is much wider, it will take longer to overheat, but over a single lap, there won't be much advantage in that.
The proliferation of "tuner" tires... i.e.: tires in low-profile and wide sizes in the same compound as smaller tires... is a good example of how bigger (and sometimes, wider), by itself, isn't better. At times, I've driven cars on low-pros that handled worse than stock on the racetrack... simply because the extra weight of the wheel-tire combo wasn't balanced with better grip from the tire. You know stock is enough when you're outcornering a Cooper S on 17" wheels in a Cooper on 15" wheels simply because you're wearing similar tire compounds and your higher profiles not only give you the same grip (and a more predictable edge of adhesion), but allow you to jump kerbs more easily.
Even without kerb-jumping... there was no difference in mid-corner pace.*obviously... this isn't the stock compound for either... as the Bridgestones on the Cooper S are undoubtedly superior to the 15" Contisports... but a third tire that was used for this trackday because it was cheap and disposable...
).A better compound, however, is always good... and I'll grant you that you can often find better tires in wider, low-profile sizes.
I'll debate whether it's "merely feel" if the steering becomes more sensitive to bumps and cambers... and when you go past a certain width, the radius will change if you can't package the wheel any closer to the suspension on the inboard side. Probably not a big issue with your Miata, but with strut suspension cars, it's a biggie. Of course... I agree that you can run maybe 10-20mm extra width with no problems.
I'll give you that much.
Typically, yes. Depending on the car (as you say). If the car already has incredibly large-diameter wheels with rubber-band tires, you aren't gaining anything by dropping from a 50 profile down to 40 or even 35. In fact, you're probably losing a lot of the compliance needed to "kiss the curbs" on a racetrack... or survive brushes with them on the road.
...and even then. I seem to recall one Top Gear Australia episode where they showed that the ultra-thin tires and big wheels on a factory-special Holden made it slower around the track than if they'd left it on the stock options (which were an already big 17" or 18" set)... But those cars are designed around them.
To note: You can also get a good (even lighter) lightweight wheel in small sizes with the width to fit big tires. I flirted briefly with larger wheels, then found that performance overall was better with the same width of tire on stock diameter wheels (since I didn't need anything taller to fit over my new brakes).... because the combo was lighter, with the same amount of grip available.
And like HFS says... it rides infinitely better. I got sharper turn-in with a lower profile... but I found that pumping up the pressures for those times when I'd actually need it allowed me to have both pothole-survival/ride comfort and outright performance in the same package.
As HFS notes: our roads are almost British in some places.
I once hit a brand new one... six inches deep on a perfectly flat and level highway... where a typhoon and the passage of trucks ripped out a chunk of concrete leaving a hole with nice sharp edges.
Didn't see it at all, as it was perfectly flush, and it was raining. Hit it at sixty (mph... 100 km/h!) and it pushed my rim out of shape by about half an inch. And that was with stock diameter wheels. People riding on low-pros (40-aspect ratio and below) sometimes get cracked wheels from the roads around here.
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- 2,312
- Misnblu
- Misnblu
Not everyone can afford the Ohlins which are pretty much top of the line for coilovers.
I wish I could afford the cream of the crop when it comes to coilovers but it's not happening when you're going to be spending two or three grand on just coilovers.
But I agree with alot of the commentary here about tires, profiles, and ride quality. Compromises have to be met for a car to actually be useful on the road while still being performance oriented.
So far with my car I've found that balance and the ride is amazing on any type of road.
I still have some wheel gap, my control arms are parallel with the road, and I still have full compression and rebound with the travel to keep the car comfortable on sometimes horrid pavement we have for our roads.
Where I didn't compromise was adding all poly bushings, pillow balls, and camber plates for some nice taut handling that can't be achieved with rubber components sent to us from the factory.
Hopefully I'll be tracking the car soon to see how it fares in a track environment.
Keef
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- Dayton, OH
- GTP_KeefRacer
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There's also a reason European cars, from small hatches to luxo-barges, come with enormous wheels these days, and beyond that low profile tires and in my American opinion an abnormally taught and responsive suspension. It's to soak up all those horrid craggy roads in the UK. Or is it because it makes ya'll feel like Formula One drivers?
We have Buick, man, Buick. In fact, the Buick as Americans have known it for millenia is changing to a more European philosophy of big flashy wheels and stiffer suspension. The great American highway bruisers with pillowy soft, floaty suspension are becoming a very rare breed, but we do still have one great cruiser, staid and stoic as she is.
Look at that bench. You realize how much action can go on back there, not having to worry about an epic European-style interior-length center console? The only Euro mega luxxx car I can think of with a rear bench is a Phantom, but it's more expensive and its supple leather is more difficult to clean. I mean, this things dampers are so soft that the wheel doesn't even drop into a pot hole when the car drives over it. It's spectacular.
EDIT: To keep on topic I tried looking for VIP Town Cars, but instead all I got were countless limousines. I've a feeling a huge Town Car would be pretty epic all VIP'd out.
Closest I can find. It's on Canibeat, and it's on a softened Euro frame, which means it can go here:
I love the color of the car and wheels on the green one. I'd rock it.
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