I had my 16" wheels fitted with 185/50R16 Nexen Nfera summer tires:
I like the look, but I know that's probably not shared by everyone.
And here's the story behind fitting them:
I had billet aluminum wheel adapters made to fit the lightweight Mk1 Ford Focus wheels I already had. I had to adapt the Lancia's 4x98 M12x1.25 bolts to Ford's 4x108 M12x1.5 studs (along with a conversion of the Lancia's 58.1mm hub to the Ford's 63.4mm to keep hub centricity). Furthermore, the new wheels are a more modern 48mm offset. This meant that if I wanted to retain the proper offset on the Lancia, I needed an the adapter made with a spacer thickness of 28mm (even though 25mm was the original bow-tie's offset, that utilizes a 5mm spacer which I wanted to account for in the new adapter, so I added the 5mm to the 23mm difference).
However, I knew that wouldn't work either as I'm using X1/9 struts which, as you may or may not know, may bolt right in but are not a "direct fit" (the lower spring perch on the X1/9 struts sit right inline with the sidewall of the front tire unlike the stock Scorp/Monte struts which were above it). This requires an extra 5mm of spacer to clear the perch. Now I'm up to 33mm. However, I wanted to preserve the right to go up a size to 195s in the future, so I had to add an additional 5mm of spacer thickness. This brought the total thickness of the spacer to 38mm, reducing my total offset by 10mm (basically cutting it in half). Not bad, but this was another reason why I want to start with the stock width and see how it all works, because I was afraid of increased steering efforts.
Here's a link to a library I made of pics I snapped while fitting the spacers:
http://s2.photobucket.com/user/tjcusumano/library/Lancia/Wheels/Spacer-adapters
With all the work I did on the steering and suspension last year, this was the last piece of the puzzle. I'm hoping for great results, but I won't know until this weekend. I'll keep you up to date...
(BTW, those are Lancia hub stickers I had made up to cover the Ford blue ovals in the center caps).
I like the look, but I know that's probably not shared by everyone.
And here's the story behind fitting them:
I had billet aluminum wheel adapters made to fit the lightweight Mk1 Ford Focus wheels I already had. I had to adapt the Lancia's 4x98 M12x1.25 bolts to Ford's 4x108 M12x1.5 studs (along with a conversion of the Lancia's 58.1mm hub to the Ford's 63.4mm to keep hub centricity). Furthermore, the new wheels are a more modern 48mm offset. This meant that if I wanted to retain the proper offset on the Lancia, I needed an the adapter made with a spacer thickness of 28mm (even though 25mm was the original bow-tie's offset, that utilizes a 5mm spacer which I wanted to account for in the new adapter, so I added the 5mm to the 23mm difference).
However, I knew that wouldn't work either as I'm using X1/9 struts which, as you may or may not know, may bolt right in but are not a "direct fit" (the lower spring perch on the X1/9 struts sit right inline with the sidewall of the front tire unlike the stock Scorp/Monte struts which were above it). This requires an extra 5mm of spacer to clear the perch. Now I'm up to 33mm. However, I wanted to preserve the right to go up a size to 195s in the future, so I had to add an additional 5mm of spacer thickness. This brought the total thickness of the spacer to 38mm, reducing my total offset by 10mm (basically cutting it in half). Not bad, but this was another reason why I want to start with the stock width and see how it all works, because I was afraid of increased steering efforts.
Here's a link to a library I made of pics I snapped while fitting the spacers:
http://s2.photobucket.com/user/tjcusumano/library/Lancia/Wheels/Spacer-adapters
With all the work I did on the steering and suspension last year, this was the last piece of the puzzle. I'm hoping for great results, but I won't know until this weekend. I'll keep you up to date...
(BTW, those are Lancia hub stickers I had made up to cover the Ford blue ovals in the center caps).
