The rear tires have plenty of clearance to the fenders. People manage to stuff on 305 wide rear tires on this platform, so my 275s are no problem.
The front fitment is pushing it with respect to clearance to the fender. Maybe I’ll do a small DIY fender roll like I did on Project S2000 back in the day. Keep in mind that I have the E-Motion Engineering suspension setup which creates a wider front track by pushing the wheels out further. With factory suspension parts, I’m sure the 19”x9” ET48 wheels with 245/40/19 tires would have plenty of clearance.
So, how are the new upgrades? With the Antigravity lithium battery installed, the car cranks up significantly stronger; I had the same experience with the lithium battery in my CBR600RR. And it always cranked strong for the ten years I had that battery in the bike. I expect the same from the Antigravity for many years to come. As for the new wheel and tire setup, it’s hitting the marks as far as what I expected out of the package. I set the tires to a cold pressure of 28psi. With the new wheels, I had to get a new set of tire pressure monitoring sensors and it took around 15 miles of driving before they registered. The car computer was not happy with the 28psi inflation pressure however, more on that in a bit.
The first thing I noticed right away was the nose of the car was angled up a bit due to my taller front and shorter rear wheel and tire packages. When I exited my complex, I didn’t scrape the air deflector in front of the front tires for the first time since I got 9.5 deg of caster dialed in. This is a nice improvement for daily driver use and counteracts the 9.5 degrees of caster which had dropped the nose in the first place.
I took the tires on some moderate scrubbing-in sessions and did some slalom movements too. The quick transient slalom movements felt a bit quicker and more stable than I recall. The reduced mass up front plays into this. Back in the day in my old FWD Nissan, I had a 10″ subwoofer box with amp mounted behind the rear seat that was in the 30lbs ballpark range. My friends and I rented out a small track in Ocala, Florida and we had our own little track day. With the sub installed which added mass to the rear, the rear of the car noticeably wanted to pendulum more in transients. I told you the wheels wouldn’t stay black long; I got a decent coating of brake dust going after about 150 miles. I did put two coats of wax on the wheels before installing them, but brake dust is a fact of life. I actually prefer the more matte finish the brake dust gives.
The 19″ RE-71RS tires lets me run 28psi cold tire pressure; they seem to like to be around 32psi hot as a generalization. I’ll see how they behave at the track soon. 28psi tire pressure with the fatter sidewall definitely helps improve the daily ride quality which I immediately noticed on the first drive. The factory 20″ tires, I ran around 31psi cold with the ‘comfort’ tire pressure setting. The standard pressure setting is around 33-34psi. Anyway, the computer gave the low tire pressure warning on startup with cold tires. Every…. single…. new…. drive from cold. This was very annoying.
