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On 21", you're not in for a comfortable ride there, dawg.
Word
I'm actually getting rid of the OEM 20s and putting 19s on my S8, not into hip hop wheels or rattling the crap out of my interior. Roads here are ****ty enough as is.
Guys, I see you're point and definitely don't disagree. However, I put less than 3k miles on the car a year and its not my daily driver so it's honestly not a tremendous concern of mine. Add in that this is not the only set of wheels I have for the car and yeah, I have my own bases covered.
To the original question, any idea on if 285/30-21 will have enough clearance?
I don't want to wade in too far here on the big wheel stuff, and I'm much more an OE wheel fan. But mishar is on the right track from the technical/measurements/appearance side. I can correlate it both with my own spacer experience, and prior posts by a guy who was a self professed wheel nut who used to have a D3 W12 and posted here, covertW12.
CovertW12 fit 285/35-20's on a fairly straight forward basis, so against 285/30-21's it should likewise work, but only at the right offsets. His posts also indicated he got to 295's, and at one point tested 305's briefly--test fit only in the 305 case IIRC. FWIW, he also posted that he found a lot of differences in actual tire width even in the same nominal size, so it was important to know the spec of the actual tire being considered as the sizing heads closer to the max.
I run 20mm spacers rear and 12 front with a stock/OE wheel set in 20 x 9, ET46, with the OE 275/35-20 tire fitment. I settled on 12mm spacers in front and 20mm in back--H&R DR's. From playing with some other fitments, a 15mm spacer up front pushed the tire out just a bit too much in the upper front area, and a 25 mm spacer in the back got just to the edge of a slight rub on the felt fender liner under extreme compression of one rear side of the suspension--an unlikely real scenario. For anyone reading this by the way with OE 8 ½'s in either 18's or 19's, the spacer fitment then is probably 15 front 25 rear to get the more aggressive buttoned down look, but still have the wheels look right just inside the natural fender lines and also have zero rubbing.
Net, if you distill down the spacer experience, you get to an average 8-10mm offset shift on (each side) back to front to dial it in. That also kind of ties off to the general Audi design (putting aside rear mid R8 as usual) of a narrower rear track than front track--the total spread across an axle line of the wheels. On the D3, I think it is a total of 14mm of difference. Every Audi I have owned has been this way--wider front track--all the way back to the C1; FWD heritage I think.
Where this all comes home and together is when you start to try to max the wheels and tires in general on the D3. It nets to you end up with somewhat less (aggressive) offset on the front and somewhat more on the back. With 275's on 9" width wheels you still have some degrees of freedom to move in and out 10-20mm, but as you get wider on wheel and tire, less so. And if you can find the old post or two where covertW12 got to his final numbers when he maxed it, it ends up you have to use less offset front than back, variously by custom wheels or spacers--only then do you maximize all of width, aggressive but still clean look, and absence of potential rubbing.
Yes, logically the issue is in the tires in that case. See my other longer reply today. I found the optimum with 275/35's on a 9" wheel with stock ET46 offset was a 12mm spacer in front. So my effective offset was ET34 for the fronts. When I tried it with the 15mm spacer that didn't quite look 100% right, it was effectively ET 31. So, throw another 10mm of nominal tire with in here-5mm on each of the inside and the outside, and it would logically make my dialed in 12mm spacers look another 2mm worse than my 15mm front spacers I already decided were just a bit too mch.
Also, note a reference in my other post today to looking very carefully at the real tire width from often available specs, not just to nominal one (275, 285, etc.) They vary quite a bit. Back to the old posts I was referencing, covertW12 found for example in the old Conti 3's he ran in 285's, those were quite wide compared to others. On my own car, I run 275's for most of the year, but a 255 fitment on winters. Those particular 255's (a winter tire spec'ed for the Cayenne) are virtually as wide in reality as most of the 275's I have run, and clearly wider when I put them in a stack compared to the 255's I had on my 2000 A6 4.2 or that I use with the current Q5. Found the same when I looked at maxing my Mini--some 215's are actually wider than some 225's, and some 225's would cleanly fit and others would rub; all starting from identical OE wheels.
Question about this comment then. Is it now only because of the 285/30 tires that this doesn't hold true? I'm a very literal thinker at times, fyi. ha
Yes, it starts with tires, but than it comes back to the wheels.
285's outer edge of the tread mounted on 32 mm offset wheels (any width) will stick out from the fender in the front area for about 1/2". I will not look good, but that part is my opinion. Somebody else might find it perfect.
So, to keep that part under the fender you need more offset or narrower tread.
More offset is not possible with wheels of that width because they will touch suspension.
255's would be fine, except those wheels are too wide for them. That is fact you may check on any tire shop site, but I've seen even narrower tires mounted on too wide wheels and it was not the end of the world. It would hurt performance, wheels would be extremely exposed and easily damaged.
Narrower wheels would fix all that. If you go with 21x9.5 ET45 285/30x21 all would be good. Except ride quality and performance that can't be good with that small sidewall. That is fact too, not an opinion, but I accept that it is not important to everybody.
07-28-2014, 06:14 PM
