I had a blowout yesterday in my twin turbo Subaru. That pissed me off as I was only taking it around the corner to pick up some groceries, and I had to change the wheel on the side of the road. What made it really worse though, is I discovered that the car has one of those stupid "compact" spare wheels? WTF?
Wheels and parts by
Terry Prendergast, on Flickr
Who's hair brained idea was it to have a wheel which is a couple of inches smaller in diameter than the OEM original alloys? (Subaru put these 17" BBS wheels on all of the B4 GT's) I mean, it's got AWD with front and rear LSD, so surely that would fcuk something up? This car has got very "flat" suspension, so it felt like it was riding on the other 3 wheels and holding that pissy spare up off the ground on my way home as I crept along like I was doing the "Walk of shame" with my little chicken yellow wheel.
Today I took the rim with the blown out tyre to the tyre store. The guy asked me what tyre I wanted, and I explained that I'd like one that was round, and black. Price was no object, so the cheapest one would do. The one that blew out was a Dunlop that hadn't done 20,000 miles, so I got him to put on a Chinese one like the ones I had on my Mitsubishi Outlander that had done 50,000 miles and the tyres were still roadworthy when that peanut hit my car in 2021 while doing a burnout, and wrote it off. It cost 10 bucks more than the Stinko I put on the back of my K0.
Wheels and parts 1 by
Terry Prendergast, on Flickr