Jordanf

I'm looking at doing an aggressive winter wheel setup with snow tires on my UCF10 in the near future.

How well do mildly stretched winter tires hold up in the snow?
I would imagine the tire stretch would stiffen up the sidewalls on these soft tires?

Looking at doing
225/40/18 on a 9.5, or 235/40/18 on a 10 etc.

Shmee

iTrader: (3)

You want narrow tires to cut through snow and stay in contact with the ground. Having a stretched tire would sort of defeat that purpose...


But being in the LML, where it only snows maybe 2-3days/year, you could probably get away with it.
I'm not sure if I'd want to run a crazy stretch though, the carcass of snow tires are not generally design to support big lateral loads and hard cornering. You could probably roll the bead right off the rim if you were pushing a little too hard.

Jordanf

I figure a mild stretch wouldn't be much of an issue. Looking online it seems that snow tires will stretch easily because of the soft sidewalls and are reasonably safe

PureDrifter

iTrader: (10)

soft sidewalls are easily stretched and even more easily damaged.

UNCNOR

iTrader: (1)

OK,I'll bite............Why would someone want to stretch a winter tire or any other type of tire????????????

Shmee

iTrader: (3)

Winter tire? Stance life year round in places not in the southern US.


Any tire, wide low offset wheels with lots of dish or to flush up to the fender for a cleaner look.

Kingsoup

If you live in the interior or something, you'd better run a top quality snow tire, I wouldn't mess around with stretched snows or anything, thats for summer if its your thing. Run a properly aggresive set of snows, not performance snows, but like nasty Goodyear Ultra Grips or something, 1 wheel drive in the rear + real winter = bring your A-Game.
If you can run studded I totally would, thats my plan for this year, my last Celsior was not good in winter with performance snows.

Also you want some sidewall size to take up the hits of hidden potholes and ice chunks you're gonna hit winter, soft sidewall is perfect for this, you won't be cornering hard anyways so performance style tires will be useless!

Jordanf

Thanks for the suggestions. I just ordered some 225/40/18s falken ziex's to use for my new wheels to temporarily hold me off until winter, then i'll switch over to a snow tire when the time comes. I'm in the interior so it's quite mild with light snow. Last year i never had any problems with my car slammed with -4 camber on hankook ipikes. I figure that going with slightly wider tires won't be an issue as long as quality snow tires are used