Fat Chance… Kandi 2.0 Gets Wider Tires

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While the FRSport crew has been busy tweaking and trophying locally at El Toro during the July 4th weekend & at National Tour/Pro events at Crow’s Landing & Packwood, I have been hard at work trimming, fitting, trimming some more, and refitting wider tires onto my 240sx in hopes of being able to run some 25×11 15″ American Racer Tire Slicks. We’ve had good local success and feedback with using these slicks for the Austin Healey Sprite that I’ve been running and I wanted to make it fit my 240sx. I got a set of their softest M28 compound and slapped them on a set of Aero Wheels made for circle track vehicles: 15×10 -38 (-63 to clear brake calipers) in front & 15×12 -38 (-48 for testing purposes) with 11″ tires all around (equivalent to about a 305 tire in treadwidth). They are super heavy steel wheels, but they clear 12.2″ rotors, woohoo!

Aero Wheels with American Racer Tires fitted onto the 240sx.
Aero Wheels with American Racer Tires fitted onto the 240sx.

A lot of fiberglass had to be cut – significantly more than when I was fitting the 275’s around, especially since the offsets are also much lower. There were other random things that had worked their way loose, but I had time to bolt everything back together. Once again, it was a “fix it until the last minute” type of days, so the alignment is now a little off from needing to fit the bigger wheels, and there is a little suspension bind after some suspension travel, but nothing too crazy that I can fix later. The most important thing was I had new tires!

Kandi 2.0 with wider American Racer Tire Slicks.
Kandi 2.0 with wider American Racer Tire Slicks.

The flares that went on the wide fenders were now rubbing the tires, so I left them completely off. Looks more Nascar than AutoX car, but I’ll take it. My overall times considering the class my car is in were still terrible, but I wasn’t expecting to set any personal records this early into the game; it’s only been about 4 months since this car has been running, after all. My first impressions of the American Racer tires on this higher horsepower setup was “wow, I have grip now!” It was interesting not completely losing grip launching in first gear and also not needing to counter-steer as much as before. In fact, in the video below of my first ever run on American Racer tires in this car, you can see hesitating and pre-counter steering because the car felt like it was about to kick out; however, it doesn’t actually kick out. I realized later on that weekend that it was most likely the super soft sidewalls of the tires that were causing this weird initial shimmy/looseness during turn-in. The tire company does make a stiffer sidewall autox specific compound now, but I wanted to test their regular setup first. If anyone has a better idea of what’s going on (I could be completely wrong), please let me know.

2014 SCCA July Regional at El Toro AFB_Nivo Slider-005

The car and I are still 2-3 seconds off the pace of local competition, but Sunday’s fun runs got me a little bit closer. Now I have to get off my lazy butt and fix the current issues so she can be even faster.

A lot of people like to post their fastest runs of the weekend (I usually do, as well); however, I wanted to posted my very first run – I find it much more interesting seeing how I’m reacting to the car, etc. with the latest setup changes. I have to learn to trust my car a lot more. For Saturday, I improved a little over 2 seconds from this initial run. For Sunday, I did much better in relation to what my competitors were running during the weekend.

[youtube height=”338″ width=”600″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W79YfGnHj8[/youtube]

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