Driving down Hwy 101 in the dark of the early morning.
Headlights piercing the darkness ahead, I ease off the throttle for the Los Carneros exit.

BAM!!

From out of nowhere a new pothole targets my right front SSR Competition wheel and hits like an alligator strike.

Hands gripping the wheel, my heartrate slowly drops toward normal while I realize that the car is not shaking nervously, but still rolls smothly forward, tracking straight.

A sigh of relief, I think I've dodged a bullet.

Not so!

Later I discover that the machined lip is peeled back away from the 205/40ZR17 Goodyear Eagle F1 GS-D3. There's a clean break in the aluminum alloy lip at the base of the bend.

Heartbreak!

The dilemma? These wheels, SSR Competition Silver, 17x7.5, are no longer manufacturered. They cost $350.00 each. Seems as though none are on the shelf anywhere. Not with distributors, not on ebay, not on Craigslist. So I now have $1100.00 worth of alloy wheels that are scrap because I can't complete a rolling set.

This all leads me to two questions:

1) Is this kind of damage repairable?
2) Here's the really creative part:

A similar situation happened a couple years ago. A construction brick looming in the darkness takes out my two right-side wheels, leaving me holding two good ones that are identicle to the current set except they are 16-inch instead of 17-inch.

Is it possible to combine my remaining good hardware and run mismatched sizes?

I know this is probably a goofy idea, but I'm trying to avoid throwing away $1750.00 worth of good wheels and starting with a clean slate.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

It's probably able to be done if you could get the overall diameter of the wheels/tires to be close to matching for the front and the rear of the vehicle. Lots of performance cars these days will use a smaller front wheel and a larger rear wheel and tire combination. Corvette and Elise/Exige are 2 cars that come to mind first that run this staggered setup. On your Teg, you could run the 17's in the back with the 205/40/17 tires and the 16's in the front with a 205/45/16. The rear overall diameter will be 23.45" and the front will be 23.26". The sidewall height will be 3.22" for the rear and 3.63" for the front. Revs per mile for the rear tires will be 886 and 894 for the front due to the smaller diameter of the front wheel/tire combo. Your front wheels being lighter and having a slightly smaller overall diameter with also help a little with acceleration, etc. This is probably your best option with your current "hodge podge" set of wheels & tires. The front wheels are gonna have a little more sidewall than the rear but only 0.4 inches, nothing extreme or crappy looking compared to the rear. The width and contact patch for the F/R tires will be the same as before with the matching 205mm width tires you'd use. I work for Bridgestone/Firestone and on customer cars, we wouldn't recommend this fitment unless it was OEM spec. On my car, if I had no other choice, I would do what I had to do to make it work though! Good luck! Hit me up if you have any other questions.

P.S. I've run 205/40/17, 205/40/16 and similar low sidewall tires before and they are about the worst size tires to run for wheel protection. We both know that's the risk we're taking to have the "rubber band" look that so many people are after. I'm currently running a 205/50/15 wheel and tire setup and it has pretty good protection while not looking like crap with too much sidewall.

 

sorry to hear about that...those SSR wheels, while fancy and light, tend to bend easier than other "forged" wheels. post pics of the damage. i would like to see...

 

mdb20...

Thank you so much for that Great Response! It's exactly what I was hoping for, and coming from someone with knowledge in the field makes it so much the better.

Spec R: I will try to post pics in the coming days. I would have included some, but I wanted to get my question out there as quickly as possible.

My primary option is to explore the repair possibilities. So tomorrow I am driving to a repair outfit that I located about an hour away from me. The good news so far is that, when I described the damage to them on the phone, they didn't say they *couldn't* do it. So I'm going to let them have a look about noon tomorrow.

Worse case then, sounds like a mix & match as described by mdb20. Of course this introduces a secondary, if slightly less serious, problem. In researching my options I made the annoying discovery that Goodyear no longer manufactures {sound familiar?} the Eagle F1 GS-D3 in the 205/40-17 size. This means that I would have to run a different brand of tire in the front. I have a feeling that this is not a good idea {mdb20: advice?}. Otherwise I would have to buy a new set of 4 tires, 16-inch in the front, 17-inch in the back.

My head is starting to hurt a little bit, but thank you so much for the responses so far.

 

If you don't have the money, or want to spend it on a matching set of tires, then I guess your only other option would be to purchase different tires for the front wheels. Why is it that you like that particular model of Goodyear tires? All the major tire brands make comparable all season and high performance summer tires. It's just a matter of price, brand loyalty or what tread pattern you like. I've run Yokohama, Nitto, Falken, Kumho, and Bridgestone on my Integras, and they all performed pretty well. Some better than others in certain aspects, but that was expected. Worse case scenario, do some research and find the replacement tire that Goodyear came out with to replace the tire that you're unable to find. Buy that tire or find the closest match in their current tire lineup that meets your specifications. With Bridgestone, we have the RE-040, RE-050 and now the new RE-11. All the tires have similar technology in the rubber and similar tread patterns. The tire has just evolved over the years through small improvements. I'm not familiar with Goodyear's current tire line, but they probably have something pretty similar to the discontinued tire that you're looking for.

 

This doesn't help or answer any of your questions, but I used to have a set of Silver 17 x 7.5 SSR comps on my 99 Si. Sold them to a friend who runs them on his 01 GSR sedan. Still miss those wheels....

 

I checked out TireRack to see if Goodyear made any tires that would work for your front wheels in a 205/45/16 size. Unfortunately, they don't carry anything in that size that would match up well with the Eagle F1 GS-D3 that you'd have on the rear wheels. They don't have anything in their high performance summer or all season lineup that would work. I also noticed, as you stated before, that the GS-D3 isn't available anymore in a 205/40/17 fitment. Your best bet at this point would be to see if you can get the wheel fixed or just try to find some new/used front tires in a 205/45/16 that would work until you wear the back tires out or decide to buy a whole new set with different front and rear sizes. BTW, one thing that I forgot to mention the other day, but you may have already thought about. With different size wheels, you obviously won't be able to rotate your tires "normally". This is especially true is the tires are directional. Unless the tires are dismounted from the wheels when the rotation is done on the car, since the wheels will have to go side to side, instead of the normal front to back then cross the rears to the opposite front position. If it were me, I'd buy a set that weren't directional to simplify the process significantly.

 

mdb20: I really appreciate all the research you've done on this. Yes, I considered the tire rotation snafu that I could wind up with, and accepted the fact that a new set of tires might be the best, if expensive, option.

But all is not lost!

The wheel repair outfit that I visited last friday accepted the wheel for repair. The process consists of heating the damaged area (heat doesn't temper aluminum like it does steel), reshaping the bent lip, welding the break and refinishing. They were pretty confident of the outcome, and said it would be ready in 2-3 weeks.

Here's what the damage looks like:

https://www.honda-acura.net/forums/a...1&d=1240853162

Drat, this link doesn't seem to work. It seems as though I've "specified an invalid attachment."

At any rate, I'll report back in 2-3 weeks with the results.

 

Your link doesnt work.

 

Let me try this one more time. It might be of interest to those who have met a similar fate out in the real world of road hazards:

https://www.honda-acura.net/forums/a...1&d=1241014192

There, see attached image below. Hope it works for any interested viewers.

Oh, and SiClone, your post on 4/26 made me chuckle. I could SO relate