Something like a 9" rim somewhere around 35 offset with a 255 width tire and your car not lowered too much . . .

Agreed. I ran 255/40-17 RA-1's on a 17x9 +35. No spacers, no rubbing. Some camber is required to tuck the tires in though.

John

Hmm, but the one who replied said 18s, not 17s were best.

My car is running 275/40-17s w/ 9.5" Enkeis (rolled fenders) w/ some success...

See Ivey Tune in NJ - not far from Newark Airport. He's excellent.

Thats sort of like buying new golf clubs - then the result is squarely on the shoulders of the user....

Wish this was around when I bought mine.....

Exactly - you don't have to wonder "Is the shock valving good, are my sping rates right, is my suspension geometry optimized?" You know the car is good and can do it.

If someone hops in the car and is way off the pace you can no longer blame the car. I still find myself trying to blame my car sometimes when the times aren't as fast as I want. Then someone else hops in it and beats me by a good margin and I'm like "Well, guess I better stop pointing fingers and look at how I can improve myself. . . "

It's never been the car. I can put a "national caliber" driver in my evo and they will easily get one of the faster times of the day. It's amazing and humbling to see what a good driver can do with my car with it's current setup.

Not sure if this is the best place to ask, but has anybody here snapped any extended wheel studs off? Last Thursday, I snapped off two extended wheel studs on my RF corner; they sheared off right near the base. I had the extended wheel studs on the front hubs for fitment of my 18x10 CCWs with 13mm spacers, but at the time that the studs snapped off, I was running on the street with my daily driver all season tires on 17x8 RPF1s. I've used aluminum lug nuts almost exclusively for years and always torque the nuts by hand to 70 ft/lbs. Between the relatively low torque and the fact that my lug nuts are aluminum, I figured that there was little chance that I was stressing the studs excessively...

Are you guys treating wheel studs as a periodic maintenance item? These studs were installed in Spring 2005.


On other news, my car threw a P0420 check engine code -- I guess my cat is toast...

lemme guess, KYO-EI wheel studs?

We had 4 of them shear off at the same time at one of our local events about a year ago. Scared the crap out of me. I'd recommend changing all of your wheel studs at this point as the others are likely in similar condition.

IMO, the loose torque setting is probably contributing to the fatigue issue. I'd also guess that you don't have hub centric wheel spacers, which greatly increases the fatigue load on the studs.

Yep. I guess maybe I'll replace them all -- which at this point just means the LF corner. (The rear hubs are still running stock studs.) I switched a set of 5 of my stock studs back onto the RF corner to get the car driveable again, but I can't fit my race wheels until I fit new extended studs.

Does ARP make extended wheel studs for an Evo fitment, or what is a good strong extended wheel stud?

i've been running arp studs for two seasons of nasa time trials with no problems at all.
but i have heard quite a few people having problems with some of the other studs out there.

ARP does make them.
I torque to 80 ft/lbs personally and do have hubcentric spacers, i havent had problems with the Kyo-ei but I am figuring that I will pop them soon.

I bought our ARP studs from Summit. We still run the stock studs in the rear. The front takes all the abuse. We also torque the lugs over the stock spec. We kept increasing until the fretting on the wheel spacers stopped getting worse. We don't use Al lug nuts though.

Looks like a common issue. You might find something useful here:

http://holunfie.blogspot.com/2008/04/studdly.html

I had a similar thing happen this year. Mine went in beginning of 06, never driven is salt/snow.

John