We installed new wheels and tires on our Saab 9-2x this weekend. The stock 16-inch wheels were needed on our Subaru Rally project for some street travel to RallyCrosses. This gave us a chance to bolt on a set of very light and very strong (and very attractive!) Team Dynamics Pro Race 1.2 wheels. These 17x7 inch wheels weigh 17 pounds a piece.
These were mounted up with Nitto‘s NeoGen tires. These street performance oriented tires are designed to work well with large amounts of negative camber (think rear of slammed Honda Civic) without being chewed to shreds. Since many of our cars have track friendly (but not tire friendly) alignments, we thought these would be a great tire to check out.
Our Saab actually had a pretty funky alignment to begin with, with close to a degree of negative camber in the rear wheels and a little bit of positive camber in the front. Talk about a recipe for understeer! It made even fun street driving a little numb. With the wheels off, we adjusted the factory eccentric strut mounting bolts to their maximum amount of negative camber, in this case, about .8 degrees. We then dialed our toe to zero on the front wheels, leaving the back as-is.
The result is a much higher level of grip, equating to more driving fun and more safety!
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