[Ben@SpeedTech]

Thanks for your thoughts. Do you mean the tires or wheels? Roger likes the deep rear offset look so although the wheels are almost the same width they look completely different. The shallow offset of the front wheel is the only way to stuff an 11" wheel and 315 tire under a 69 Camaro without modifying the fenders.

As far as tires go, there is often no real advantage to a wider tire on the rear unless the rear suspension is designed for it. Consider that a well set up car has a front suspension that does the work and the rear suspension faithfully follows the front. Some chassis builders like Ron Sutton have actually run a slightly wider tire up front with great success. Again it depends on how the suspension is set up. When possible we actually prefer to run the same size all around on cars that will race. 315s out back is no big deal with a minitub. But this is the whole reason the new Extreme frames and chassis are being designed specifically to fit a 315 up front too. RedZed could easily swallow a 335 out back (it had 345s under it before) but the 315 gives it a better balanced feel on the track. In the main brands of competitive "sticky" 200 tw tires the 315 is readily available too. Another obvious reason for the same size all around is for rotation purposes. I run the same 9.5" wheel and 275 tire all around on my car so I can easily swap them around after each race. On RedZed we'll simply remove and swap the tires on the wheels after races. More even wear means your investment lasts longer.

I think running larger rear tires on a pro touring car is mostly a bleed off of our old ways of thinking, muscle cars with as wide a tire out back as we can squeeze under it, and something skinnier up front, ...function follows form. In today's competition based pro touring cars the case more often than not is such that form hopefully keeps up with function, right?