Wheel spacers

[Perfectlap]

17mm and 21mm?
That's BIG SPACE!
are you sure that's the size?

who makes the spacers?

I would suggest putting on only Porsche spacers.

Those wheel bearings according to BruceL. are $600 EACH!

Make sure your wheels have the EXACT correct offset and your lug nuts are not over or under torqued. Too much torque and you could be looking for trouble.

[Stryke]

I had the 5mm Porsche kit all around with Sport Techno's and it looks wicked!

I sold the car so I don't have it anymore but I would not go anything above 5mm on a Boxster both for looks and for mechanics.

[ntmatter]

Also keep in mind that the Porsche spends millions of dollars on getting the suspension geometry of a particular car just so - spacers will mess this up and the bigger the spacer the worse your handling will be. The same applies to wheels - wide wheels with big offsets look cool, but most will underperform the stock setup at the track.

[Adam]

There must be alot of ill-informed info out there because I was told that wider is better for the handling. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Porsche widen the 987 1/2-1inch over the 986?

[PAH]

I'm seriosuly thinking of getting 5mm spacers all round for mine. The Turbo Twists (Version 1) look good, but the extra 5mm would fill the arches perfectly. It's just difficult to justify the cash for such a small piece of round metal!!!

[CincyFreeze]

Can someone post a picture of a boxster with spacers on it? How much different over stock does it look? More agressive?

[ntmatter]

I'll move this note to the front of this post because I realized I got into a bit of a rant and want to stay on-topic: Wider is not necessarily better for handling. The 5mm spacers would be great to make the car look cool, stay away from anything bigger until you've at least tried these.

Anyone who says that wider is always better is uninformed. Wider MAY be SOMETIMES better for CERTAIN applications, but you want to be careful. Picture in your head the interaction of the upper and lower control arms, shocks, steering linkage, etc as your wheel travels through it's full up-down range of motion. Imagine the industrius Germans wearing white lab coats in huge computer labs refining the exact angles and positioning necessary of the entire suspension system to get the best weight distribution and chassis handling through all of the suspension loading scenarios. These calculations take into account the mass distribution in the car, the flex and other characteristics of each part, the behavior of things like wheel bearing under load; in short, a lot of planning goes into the stock setup.

Now, move the tires out an inch or so but don't change the spring rates, shock load and unload rates, steering geometry, or alignment settings. If we're talking a 5mm space you'll get a nice look and probably won't notice much if any difference one way or the other under most street and even track scenarios. But, if you move the wheels out 30mm each, then the car's just not going to handle right if you really get on it.

I've tried to use spacers on my last track car (not a Porsche, but same principles) and in the end couldn't get around the fact that spacers ended up making the car look cool but caused problems. These included some nasty torque steer, rubbing the wheel wells, weird handling, and I kept burning up wheel bearings and breaking lug bolts.

As with fancy air intakes, you can do them for the performance look, but be realistic in your expectations.