Subjective:
In my quest to have a well performing, yet as-stock-as-possible looking car, I have decided
to go to the 315/35ZR17 rear tires. For my new tires, I chose the BF Goodrich g-Force T/AKD. These are supposed to be the new bad boy on the street, providing
"near R-compound levels of grip". Adding that much tire isn't easy, and since I absolutely love the looks
of the stock WS6 rims, I wanted to continue to use them.
The first order of business then, was to have the stock rear rims widened to accomodate the wider tires. For this,
I turned to Erik Vaughn, the proprietor of Vaughn Machine (626-358-6413) in Monrovia, CA. The plan was to cut off
the stock inner rim piece and weld on an aftermarket one. Erik uses Budnik inners from their 3-piece wheels.
Erik immediately recognized that my rims tapered from front to back, with no step, and realized that he would have
to use the largest inner available, raising costs a little. He then cuts off the stock inner, heats the wheel face,
and welds the new inner in place. He cut the weld tops for balance, then added a silicone coating to the weld to
prevent leakage. His turn around time was quick too, and he did an awesome job for only $225 per rim. That's about
the same price as a set of aftermarket rims, but I want to keep the car looking stock.
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Here's the finished product |
Just behind the front lip |
And Here's the the rim |
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Here's the new 315/35ZR17 |
Here is the tire mounted on the |
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Here's a view of the modified rim and tire combination (left) and
the stock rim and tire (right). |
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Here is a stock inner fender well, with the |
Here is my modified inner fender. You can just see the |
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Here is the new location of the rear axle snubber. |
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On the left are the stock wheel wells. On the right are the modified wheel wells, once they were cut. Here you can see the difference in space to the wheels, and the quality of the job that was done. The modified wells need a slight touch up on the paint of the bottom side, but you can't see that looking at the car, so it's no big deal. |
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Here you can see that going from the stock 17x9" rims with the G-Force 275/40ZR17 tires
to my widened 17x11" rims with the same G-Force tires, but of a 315/35ZR17 size, netted a loss of 3.6
horsepower and 3.5 lb-ft of torque. Hopefully that will be more than made up for with the
gains in traction.