It's more of an issue with race tires and a car driven at the limit, but yes.Quote:
So too wide of a tire can cause hubs to fail? I always thought it was the lack of proper amount of tire under the car that caused a hub to fail.
The wider the tire and the larger the offset (ie outboard) the longer the lever arm on the hub. The longer the lever, the more force the hub has to resist and the more fatigue.
The 2G DSM front hub has a distinct stress raiser in it and racing fatigued the hell out of the hub. Stress cracks would start at the raiser and would propegate through the hub. Eventually it would completely shear. If you were lucky, the axle retaining nut would hold the wheel on. If you were unlucky, it would snap the end of the axle off too.
I broke two, one of which took out an axle. Fedja broke a couple too. Shortly thereafter, I took the hint and changed them twice a season, no questions asked. I added up the number of minutes on each hub that broke, divided that in half, and changed the hubs whenever they had that much run time on them.
I did the same thing with transmissions too. Parts used on race cars have short service lives.
The problem exists on wide tires used on the street as well, in that you are feeding more load through the hub. The degree is far less though, as you aren't cornering at the limit really at all, and if you are, the limits are far less than on race tires. Keep in mind that my DSM would see 1.7G transients and would happily sustain 1.3G. You won't get anywhere near that on street rubber.
So yes, shorter service life on the street compared to a narrower tire, but nowhere near as drastically as the race tire.
More worrying for street use is the tire sticking out proud of the fender. You'd be surpised how much crap will be flung off those wheels. Drive on a gravel road, or in the rain, and shit will fly everywhere.
The other side effect of super-wide tires is that the tires are wider than the typical rut depressions you find on heavily travelled roads (like I-94 in Detroit) The thing will tramline down the rut like an SOB and is really just annoying to drive.
There really isn't any need to go wider than about a 265 on a street car. With decent tires that'll produce tons of grip with limits really very high, but they'll still fit inside the fenders and they won't tramline too badly. Anything more than that is really trading function for fashion.
Race car, different story. Race car you stuff as much tire in as you can and live with the tradeoffs.
DG
