Tires and Tribulations

I’ve had my mr2 for around 5 years now. When I bought it, it had some nice 5Zigen FN01R-Cs, a period correct wheel. 235/40 on 17x8+35 front, 255/40 on 17x9+35 rear. Ideal fitment. Super flush, didn’t rub on anything, nothing hit on compression. For the time, the car looked good with them. But, after I painted the car, they seriously began to look dated. Maybe it was just the faded black powdercoat, maybe it was the mild curb rash, maybe it was the older design. But I wanted to change it up. Being the basic bitch that I am, I had always lusted after TE37s. Not enough to buy them new, but I always kept my eyes out for used wheels in similar sizes.

Notice the all season rears? More on that later

At some point I hear about croooober, a site which inventories UpGarages in Japan, a chain of used performance car parts stores. One of their highest volume items being wheels. After a while of searching, I find them. Volk TE37s. 17x8.5+42 front, 17x9.5+38 rear. 1/2” bigger than my current wheels, with similar offsets. The numbers show that they should work. They came off of a Supra which have very similar fitment. $648 + shipping to the US, not bad, everything sounds great right?

They’re gold.

What’s new Subaru, we’re coming after you

This doesn’t really bother me, it will give me a chance to pick the exact colors I want. So I order them, and a few weeks later test fit on the car. Rear appears to clear everything, front looks close, but when I try to spin the wheel I notice it scrapes on the strut. Not a big deal, it only needs about 10mm more of clearance. Order a spacer, send the wheels off to powdercoating, Robert’s your cousin’s dad.

I ended up choosing Graphite Charcoal (PMB 5458) from Prismatic Powders. They didn’t turn out quite as sparkly as I wanted, but they look good. Man those look wide without tires.

So they look great. I got some retroreflective red spoke stickers and some matching red lugnuts. (Note: I bought the Gorilla Aluminum Red lugnuts, they actually worked well in the years I had them, but they shredded at the smallest sign of a thread deformity. If you get these, run a thread chaser on the studs before install. Or, just get steel ones. Now I have GKTech lugnuts and they’re better). Fitment is great, front sticks out a tiny bit more than it did before. Not enough to worry, they still don’t rub or hit anything. So, perfect setup right? Don’t touch it, drive it as is? OR, do I play with luck and get coilovers to lower the car? Of course I choose the latter. Some custom built BC coils with nonstandard springrates. (NOTE: knowing what I know now, I would not buy these coilovers again. They work well enough to not replace them, but I wouldn’t buy them again. Contact me to know more if you are considering buying them.)

I fully expected more clearance issues. But the biggest issue I found was from an unexpected location. The wheels hit the spring. Even with my 10mm spacer, there was contact against the spring. Through some more measuring I need about 12mm on top of my 10mm spacer to get the clearance I need. a 22mm spacer is hard to come by so I buy a 25mm spacer instead, and just deal with the extra 3mm, no big deal. (foreshadowing). This makes the wheels stick WAY out past the fender beyond what I consider acceptable.

Bodywork isn’t something I wanted to address, so I decide to run as much negative camber as possible to at least tuck the top of the tire inside the fender and have any hope of clearing. It’s not super noticeable and it doesn’t look terrible. It mostly clears for my purposes and for a daily it’s mostly fine. I’ll eat my words but it’s not a problem I wish to deal with.

Well it’s a problem I have to deal with. At one point while driving agressively on a road with a lot of fast elevation change, my tire caught my fender and pulled it pretty hard. It definitely could have been worse but it crunched pretty good and cracked paint. At minimum I needed to roll the fenders further. Previous owner rolled them a bit but not quite enough for a car this low.

I debate with myself for a while about what to do. Should I try rolling the fenders? Should I cut my losses and just get a bolt-on fender flare? Give up and sell the car? Change my name and leave town? Buy a plane ticket and take asylum in Herzegovnia? I see an Amazon fender roller in my immediate future. Pick up whichever one has the shortest reach available, and while I haven’t read anything on the forums about this, it was way too long. I still needed to cut a good chunk out of the length of it to make it collapse enough to touch the fender on the MR2. Anyway, that works okay but it’s far from perfect. I go ahead and roll the rears a little farther while I’m at it. You can still tell the front fender was munched a little, but it’s a lot better. It doesn’t rub on compression there anymore so I consider that a win.

A side effect of running that much camber (about 3.5 degrees front and rear) is that obviously you will get increased tire wear. Especially if you get a little trigger happy with a torquey NA motor and after you freshly install an LSD and decide that donuts is your best course of action. Ask me how I know. I knew that these tires didn’t have long for this mortal plane. But I didn’t expect it to go quite like this. I’m driving home and notice the a weird noise coming from the right rear tire, and the car drove a little odd. I pull over to check and the tire’s completely flat. Go figure. Tow the car home, take the wheels off, lo and behold…

That’s right, I corded the tires so hard I punched a hole in them! Now, before you call me stupid, and irresponsible, while true, I fully expected this to happen and planned around it. These were Azenis FK450s, which are all seasons and a harder compound. I wanted to get my donut phase out of me before I spent money on new tires. I never drove more than about 5 miles from home, and avoided the freeway. So, easy enough, order tires, wait a week for them to show up, have my buddy install them at the dealer, go home with some fresh RT615k+s. But there’s one thing missing from this being the perfect setup, and a slight fix to something previously mentioned…

BAM! Thought wide fenders would be a good fix, and these MadPSI units take the cake. About 1-1.5” wider, I think they look great, and fitment was actually very good for aftermarket fiberglass parts. The gap you see there is actually because of my hood, which is aftermarket fiberglass parts. Finally I can dial out some camber and try to use the whole tire instead of just the inside of the contact patch. Just have some very slight bodywork ahead of me and send them off to paint. I wanted to run these for a bit as-is to make sure I worked out any kinks before they have paint on them, and to make sure the fiberglass sets into the proper shape. But honestly, the black fenders are growing on me. Something about it, I’m not sure what, but I like it. I will still absolutely paint these no doubt, but something about it I just like. Driving around a few days, nothing hits or rubs, however I still plan to cut most of the inner lip off, to maximize future tire clearance. I’ll leave on a cm or so just to keep some sort of rigidity there. Included in the kit were some “widebody bumper” pieces, that are supposed to tie the edge of the fender better into the front bumper, but I’m not yet sure how I feel about them, so I remain undecided.

As noted earlier, I had to run spacers to get enough clearance to my coilovers. At some point I developed a slight vibration in my front end at speed, and I thought it might have to do with the non-hubcentric spacers I was running. They were supposed to be for a 370z, and I pressed Toyota studs into it, so they had the wrong hub size. I end up picking up some H&R 25mm spacers to replace them. Bolt em on, install the wheels, take it for a test drive. Then disaster strikes.

I get about 100 feet down the street, then hear a LOUD grinding sound and my car can barely move. I get out to check, can’t see anything in the brakes, but I back up and go back into my garage. I bought hubcentric 25mm spacers to replace my existing 25mm spacers, so what gives? Well, as it turns out, I did not have 25mm spacers. I had 30mm spacers. I bought the first set as 25mm spacers, not as 30mm. Why I didn’t take another second to measure, I don’t know. Well, I don’t want to put my old spacers on, I don’t want to buy new spacers, but I do anyway, order another spacer from H&R, this time in the proper 30mm spec. But I then I remember something, I still had the old 10mm spacer. So, I did the most ricer thing I have ever done, and I spacer stack. Run the 10mm under the 25mm, and get an effective 35mm spacer. I had extended wheel studs from the original 10mm install, so there was plenty of thread to go around. Plus those fenders could stand to get filled out some more.

With that, my immediate plans are to get this car to 100% before MR2 Nationals, which I will finally be attending this year. I should probably replace my front tires, which makes me regret replacing my rears just a few weeks ago. I want to get the fenders paint matched, leaving the vent black as an accent color. I wanted to start the RAV4 swap this month, but that might be delayed just due to that. Oh well, in time all works out.