What are the downsides of running wheel spacers? Are they safe on the street?
On the road/turning track?
On the strip?

 

In a perfect world, no downsides. In reality, there is just one more place for things to go wrong. You may loose a bit of accuracy locating the rim to the flange.

I just went through this with my transmission guy. He rebuilt my T5 and wanted me to run a shim behind my flywheel to compensate for machining the surface. I refused because I prefered the trueness of a bare flange to the flywheel.

I have 17" Cobra rims on my car and it came with very thin spacers. They are about 1/8". Presently I have a set of crappy 10 holes, no spacers, with 70 series winter tires. It's smoother at fast highway speeds. This makes me wonder.

It boils down to. Sometimes you do what you have to do but if budget was of no concern I'd rather have the correct offset and no spacer.

 

The only real potential problem that you could run into with spacers, other than wheel and fender clearance issues, would be a lack of proper threads for the lugs on your wheels. Remember that as you increase the distance from the wheel to the hub with a spacer, you are decreasing the corresponding threaded area for the lugs to hold onto the studs. If you get a thick enough spacer, you should probably look into getting longer studs so that you can still maintain the proper number of threads that are used from the studs to the lug nuts.

Jon

 

Wider track at a given end will give better handling on that end BUT running too wide a spacer also affects your effective spring rate, so be careful of going too wide. That and go hubcentric or don't even bother.

 

Some spacers come with their own set of lugs on them. The original lugs hold the spacers, & then the wheels bolt to the spacers.