Ah I see what you are saying Steve but on the S2 the wheel would be where it was supposed to be since the use of the spacer is to put the wheel in it’s original place relative to the bearing
I may be being thick…but I think you are missing the point - If you put a wheel on the same hub with a bigger offset, the wheel will sit further inside the wheel arch because the wheels bolting face will have to move further in to meet the hub.
In the above example if the original wheel had a zero offset, then fitting this wheel (assuming rim width to be equal in both) would require a spacer to fill the gap labelled as “offset”.
The weight acting on the wheel is transferred to the hub via the wheelface. In the above example you can see it is further from the hub than the original.
A weight acting at a distance from a point will transfer a greater loading than a weight acting at the point. When we are talking cars the point is the hub and the critical component is the bearing.
Lotus, who are recognised by the motoring world as THE best at ride & handling DO NOT recommend the use of wheel spacers on any of their products. Of course, there are others who know better…
Not sure that’s completely true tim. I thought the motorsport mags for the S1 were recommended to have 3mm spacers on the rears to prevent chassis rub.
I understood it was Lotus motorsport, Kershaw used them.
I stand to be corrected but I didn’t think that there was an official link between Lotus and Kershaw when he was racing, ie, he was not racing as “Lotus”.
However, I think this is just to put the offset back to what the Rimstocks are.
My understanding, from following the series at the time, was that the smaller offset wheels were introduced into the motorsport series after the cars had been eating wheel bearings. The idea being to place less loading on them by bringing the load point closer to the centre of the bearing. They also moved to the larger bearings.
There is also a large differance between 3mm and 20mm - was Gavin running the larger bearings in the Motorsport hubs?
Ah I see what you are saying Steve but on the S2 the wheel would be where it was supposed to be since the use of the spacer is to put the wheel in it’s original place relative to the bearing
I may be being thick…but I think you are missing the point - If you put a wheel on the same hub with a bigger offset, the wheel will sit further inside the wheel arch because the wheels bolting face will have to move further in to meet the hub.
In the above example if the original wheel had a zero offset, then fitting this wheel (assuming rim width to be equal in both) would require a spacer to fill the gap labelled as “offset”.
The weight acting on the wheel is transferred to the hub via the wheelface. In the above example you can see it is further from the hub than the original.
A weight acting at a distance from a point will transfer a greater loading than a weight acting at the point. When we are talking cars the point is the hub and the critical component is the bearing.
So you can see that when fitting the Exige wheel to the standard S2 with a spacer, the outside edge of the wheel remains in the same place relative to the hub.
So you can see that when fitting the Exige wheel to the standard S2 with a spacer, the outside edge of the wheel remains in the same place relative to the hub.
Junks - you have put alot of effort in there - just one question - what happens to the inside edge of the wheel relative to the S1 and S2 hubs?
On a separate but related issue, I had a read around and now believe that the S1 wheel locates on the flange of the hub which is load bearing. The wheel studs are not, which is different from other cars I have. Fitting a spacer that removes or reduces this load bearing area does not seem like a good idea.