@Stan Galat posted:@DannyP wrote something very true this morning while we were discussing tires in the Spyder section of this site. He said:
I just had a "chat" with Amelia from Vulcan Tire in Utah, echoing what Danny is saying. Vulcan Tire has a full listing for the Sportrac 5s on their site, and the pricing is pretty good (<$80/tire). But like everywhere else, they show limited availability-- they have (or can get) 4 of the 205/60R15s available, but only 1 of the 185/65R15s (his sizes), and only one 195/60R15 (mine). These 3 sizes would satisfy most of us.
As I see it, the problem is with Vredestein USA (the importer). I don't think anybody stocks many of these (not TireRack, not Vulcan Tire, nobody)-- they just drop ship out of the importer's warehouse, and the importer never has anything. It's a viscous cycle-- they don't sell them because they don't have them, and they don't have them because nobody buys them.
There is a way out of this. 16 tires is enough to have Vulcan Tire make a direct buy with Vredestein Holland (the manufacturer). That's only 4 sets.
It has me thinking...
Hey Stan, thanks for posting this! Vulcan is local to me.
I took a nice trip on the fresh Tarmac* today and noticed when I finished, I'm down to cord on the inside of my rear tires, so it's time to revisit.
Surfed around the Vulcan site and SportTracs are NLA, but they have Quadtrac5's which I'm fine with.
Heres the rub: they don't have the 185/65-15 & 205/60-15 combo I'm using now, but they do have the same widths in 55-50 combo.
I understand the nomenclature, so I don't need that explained, but what do y'all think of dropping down 6.5% in profile? I know I'd bump my RPM up a bit, but I'd also gain almost an inch of fender clearance.
*It broke my heart when I got almost to the end of this 16 mile road to find a road closed sign. I had to turn around and do it all the other way. FWIW, the spring I installed on my manual thermostat flaps was too heavy and it pulled the end of sheath out if it's fastener, so I had to operate it manually. Well, I would have, if I'd ever had to open them up. It ran right between 11-12 O'Clock on the gauge the whole way.