John Simister
John explains why bigger isn’t automatically better
Bigger isn’t better, says John. When it comes to wheels, at least…
Big wheels look cool. So, bigger wheels must look cooler. Not my view, but the view of many car designers, many buyers of new cars and, worryingly, some in the classic fraternity. Sometimes, though, the fixation with big wheels shod with ultra-low-profile tyres can be an aesthetic disaster with absurd results.
So, where did the fixation come from? Why were huge wheels and rubber-band tyres ever thought to be a good thing? It certainly didn’t come from motorsport, often the source of a fast car’s visual vibe; racing and rally cars often have plenty of rubber on the road, but they also retain enough sidewall depth to allow the tyres to cope with high-speed surface impacts and the effects of aerodynamic downforce.
It comes, so ex-jaguar designer Ian Callum once told me, from concept sketches, in which a tyre is represented by just a single stroke of a marker pen around the edge of a cartoon-like giant wheel.
The early sketches exaggerate design features that might appear on the finished car, but they are a starting point. From then on, wheels shrink a little as the design progresses through motor-show concept car and on to production car, but the designers do their best to keep them big and bold.
Added desirability
So, the idea of big wheels takes root as a Good Thing. They suggest power, grip, extravagance. As the new car nears its launch, the marketing people exploit the desire of buyers to have the newest, the coolest and the most fashionable things by fitting these big wheels and rubber-band tyres to the upmarket, more expensive models in the range. Simultaneously they offer similar wheels, nowadays in a bewildering and often forgettable onslaught of styles, as options on the lower-spec versions.
It becomes a self-fulfilling sales pitch, even while chassis engineers despair at the ruination of the ride and handling characteristics they have worked so hard to hone. The best the engineers can do is to design some extra compliance into their suspension bushes to make up for the complete lack of absorption from a giant, heavy wheel and a minimal sidewall. And the buyers will flock to the big wheels, seemingly oblivious to the degradation in ride quality even though today’s road surfaces are in a much worse state than they were back in the days when most cars wore 82-profile rubber.
That’s in the world of new cars. But, curiously, the same mindset can find itself filtering back in time to classics. It seems to afflict the Ford and VW scenes the most, in which you often see beautiful examples of cars from the Eighties and Seventies, otherwise perfect in almost every detail, but inexplicably wearing a set of 18in alloys. These wheels might even wear under-width ‘stretched’ tyres, a curious fashion that ensures the nowprotruding wheel rims are ready to catch any kerb and that the sidewalls can’t possibly absorb bumps.
Such tyres are stressed in unintended ways and their beads may even part company with the rims. They are dangerous. A few years ago, I was at a car show in Austria for customised vehicles from the Volkswagen Group, in which stretched tyres abounded. Then-engineering director Ulrich Hackenberg was there, too. He was mortified at what he saw and could be seen holding his head in his hands at the wrong-headedness of it all.
A stretch too far
Even without stretched tyres, oversize wheels on a classic look ridiculous. Wheels with straight, radial spokes look like cartwheels as you search in vain for meaningful rubber round the edge. Any design with a lot of space between the spokes will reveal a classic’s relatively small brakes, instantly annihilating any notion of power, speed and the ability to rein those attributes in. The cars become caricatures of themselves, shorn of all visual dignity. And, of course, their ride, handling and steering will be ruined because they were never designed not to have absorbent sidewalls.
I can understand enthusiasts’ desires to personalise their cars; it’s something we have done for years, long before the conservation of ‘originality’ became a thing. But we didn’t, in the past, set out deliberately to make our cars worse to drive. This fashion does even new cars no favours at all, but to apply it to classics is… well, it’s simply a crime. And now I’m off to polish my hubcaps.