I still have plans on getting some BN front fenders to remedy the gay stretch tire thing I have going on in the front of my car. But the rears, I know you guys were loving or hating that tuck I had going on with my previous s drives that I killed. You may have remembered this
post I made way back about wanting to try these tires out. I figured they would be the middle ground between the 615k and the RS-3. I have no idea how they perform on a track, but on a freeway they are pretty good for the cost.
I do think they're a bit grabby in wet or dry and like the other two tires they're super shitty when cold. I mainly drive my car at night so I always swerve a bit to get my tires warmed up for max debauchery. Needless to say, here we are again full circle. Time for me to ante up and replace the tires again and as much as I wanted to switch to something else due to the lack of sizes larger than 275 on the treadwidth. I'll give a thinner tire a shot one more time.
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| stretched tires are gay... mmmmkaaaay |
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| 225/35/18 on a 10in wheel, seems legit. Funny thing is they have barely worn since their purchase. |
I told myself no more stretch, I want a damn tire that fits on the wheel. Needless to say I spent the whole night debating on what tire to buy, I was looking at 300 series because I wanted some meat on the rear. I wanted it to look like it did back when I was running the RS-3's that beefy ass sidewall.
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| This is probably a bad example, but it's still a bad ass picture. |
I put the same 265's I placed on these wheels onto the lxz's and it just looked bad.
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| 265/35/18 Yokohama S-Drives on an 18x10in wheel The sidewall was a bit blockier than the rs3. Definitely rubbed more |
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| Threw them on the 11's and it was rub city, actually killed an inch of sidewall driving it at the same height. |
Then I busted the friar tuck!
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| Damn that shit looked fresh as hell |
But unlike you guys who live with your parents living that cambered life and having the ability to drop 500 dollars on tires (haha oh wait you don't run man sized wheels, and if you did you buy stretch tires because they're cheaper). I do not have that liberty, well I do but I also like having my phone on.
Needless to say I wasn't a happy camper, as you can see I made the move to Falken Azeni 615k. I upsized to 275/35/18 and for the price I got for practically new tires from the homie Jack at Jordan Innovations. I wasn't about to bitch and moan I was running two different brands on my front and rears again. That was until this shit happened.
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| tire lost air and de-beaded at around 90mph |
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| Take note of the treadlife of this tire, this is November 8th 2012 |
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| So I rolled this over to the local gas station, they filled it back up with air. And life as they say went on. |
We got two really shitty nights of rain recently out here in so cal, and I'm pretty confident of my cars handling capability in the rain due to it's wide tract and contact patch. But I was in for a surprise, because not only was my car fishtailing it's ass off. This same tire lost all of it's air again at high speeds, and I've been so paranoid about it that I've kicked the tire every time I got in to drive the car because I just didn't feel safe knowing I had a temperamental tire on the car.
The second outing in the rain, was the loosest of buttholes, I hydroplaned across 3 lanes and apparently people love to go faster than 60mph in a downpour in so cal. And trying to keep up with the traffic as to not get a tailgater up my shit was less than adventurous. I noticed that the car had puddles of water under the tires later in the day after getting it home like this.
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| My neighbor's car really doesn't allow for some sweet "I just finished driving in the rain and lived" picture. |
The reality had set in that I not only had a tire that loves to randomly just lose air and could go flat or de-bead at any time. It's tread now looked like this.
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| See above where I said pay attention to the tread depth from a month ago. |
I had put off getting an alignment because there was so much meat on these tires when I bought them in October that it wasn't even a thought that it was an urgent thing.
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| Same tires in October. |
Mind you I drive this car, TO and FROM work and maybe to my moms house or the gym. So I want to say I got roughly 500 miles over your recommended oil change interval on my last TWO sets of 400+ dollar tires. 4000+ miles of highway driving. And I am having a hard time believing my alignment is fucked since I have a fully built subframe and just got some state of the art alignment done over at JC Autohouse back in July.
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| All I did was lower the car an inch and some change, does that make me a bad person? |
So definitely I'm going to go with everyone else here and say that maybe something is not right with my alignment. So after getting all caught up with my bills and actually being a month ahead and having some money set aside. I didn't even get to wait for an emergency before doubling back down and releasing that money back into the world haha.
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| My car is dirty as fuck right now and it still looks good! |
I rotated the front tires, because I'm bad about not doing this. I got some 275/35/18 S-drives out back. And along with checking my toe at my current height I asked for the great staff of City tire to pull out my unnecessary camber. I figured once I got a tire with a bigger sidewall it may have filled up that gap but after burning up 2 sets of tires in 5 months without actually burning them up.
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| It's time to say goodbye to the / \ profile. |
Anyway moral of the story is, I had JC set the rear camber to something I think like 4.0 degree's of camber which was pretty extreme even in my own right. But that was done so the tires would clear my metal fenders at the time. With the chargespeeds that was a ridiculous amount to be running since I had all of that wheel well real estate.
The technician said I had almost 5 degree's of camber out back and the toe was slightly off, not too far from where it needed to be, but enough to slowly eat away at the tires at the camber level it was set at. So now the rear matches the front at 2.5 degree's of camber.
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| Yay, no more gap |
Boring I know, but you know what I actually prefer a more upright profile out back, I could care less about tucking rim and all of that shit. It was cool for a minute but I actually destroyed my exhaust being that low out back and not to mention getting stuck in driveways and having to clutch kick to lock my diff up to UNSTICK my car hurt my soul.
So while your cars are getting wilder and wilder, I'm just getting more boring and boring. But you won't see me crying about the rain anytime soon, lets just hope I get more than 6 months out of my tires out back. The fronts are a month away from being a year old and still look brand new.
And holy shit this was a super long post about tires. But I just had to ramble on about the importance of having your car aligned and getting the right kind of tires for your shit!
Wayne
