Overview

A potential major improvement over previous vehicle generations would be a newly designed and optimized wheel and tire system. As previously mentioned, the desire to use a different tire from previous generations requires a new rim design. Assuming a full re-design is required, there are many features about the previous generation wheels that could be improved upon.

Tire Selection

We've chosen tires from Bridgestone: Ecopia 95-80R16. Using the tire sizing chart: https://jcmotors.com/SizingChart/tire-sizing.html, we've found the dimensions of the tire to be:

Potential Improvements

Previously used wheels were designed to support all worst-case scenario loading conditions the vehicle might ever experience; however, in order to meet this goal, the wheels were simply over-designed to an extreme. The amount of material used in the spoke design was excessive. This lead to heavier wheels, resulting in increasing the overall weight of the car. In addition, a heavier wheel means an increased moment of inertia for each wheel, and a higher moment of inertia will negatively impact braking ability, handling, driver experience, and more. This opportunity for wheel redesign allows to make some design modifications to reduce the weight of the wheels by modifying the spokes to achieve a more lightweight design.

In addition, the previous iteration of MS team wheels were missing the "retaining hump", or "bead" seal that are common on most factory wheels in the automotive industry. This is could be due to the fact that this particular tire specification does not experience a lot of stretch when mounted, and thus a retaining hump is not specified, however, it was found to be extremely challenging to mount and seal previous generation wheels. Often, a large amount of bead sealer was required, and leaking tires was a frequent issue experienced during testing. Ideally, adding a retaining hump to the design fixes this issue, improving the mounting experience, and ideally preventing leaks in future.

Finally, this generation (MSXIV) requires a slightly different fitment (positive offset) in order to best match the designed suspension geometry, and fit the braking system.