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In lieu of an outright rant, I submit for your contemplation more of an anecdote with a moral, a parable if you like.
I recently decided I was finished fooling around with meager street tires when it comes to Autocrossing. One can only lose to a pickup truck or Miata so many times on account of being under-tired. Consequently, I took the steps of picking up some spare OEM rims for my MR2 on the cheap, and then swinging some Kumho V-710s from Tire Rack. So, with wheels and tires in hand, I went about getting the latter mounted on the former…. Which is where the fun began.
The first opportunity to throw everything in another car and hit a shop fell on a Sunday, so my options were somewhat limited. The local Firestone store that I normally used only operates weekdays and Saturday, and LNS motorsports also closes on Sunday. Wal-Mart won’t touch anything with lower than 55series sidewall. So, I was left with either the local Pep-Boys, or a 45-minute drive to get to Sears. I call PB, and get an affirmative response on working me in for a quick mount & balance. The whole operation took, suspiciously, a little over an hour and a half…more on that later. I get to the store, and one of the desk folk helped me put the newly mounted race tires back in the car.
After driving home, I unload the wheels and proceed to start cleaing off some of the oily fingerprints and mounting lube. At this point I notice something a bit odd about one tire, which looks like it just barely fits on the rim. I look at the tire sidewall, and then at the wheel, then back at the sidewall, and back at the wheel again. “You have got to be F*&ing kidding…” Our friends at Pep-Boys, card-carrying members of Mensa all, had managed to switch up two of the wheels and tires.
Now, before you jump to their defense too quickly, let me elaborate a bit on the magnitude of the stupidity perpetrated in this case. The wheels and tires I took in were both staggered widths. There were two 6in wide wheels, and two 7in wide wheels. Concurrently, there were two 205mm wide tires, and two 225mm wide tires. It is also important to note that this wasn’t exactly a secret, the wheel sizes are very clearly stamped on the front face of each wheel, and the tire sizes are even more conspicuous.
Logically then, and stop me if this gets too complicated at any point, one might deduce that the wider tires should get put on the wider wheels. Well, unfortunately Sherlock Holmes couldn’t be bothered from watching the game, and Dr. Watson was on the can at the time, so I ended up with one wide tire on one skinny rim.
Not at all happy about having to drive back to the store, and wait another twenty minutes while the nice gentlemen fixed their oops, I was somewhat placated by the verbal haranguing ladled on the technician by the clerks. Apparently he’d spent an inordinate amount of time banging his head against a wall (figuratively) trying, with much consternation, to get the 225mm tire on the 6in rim, hence why the initial mounting took so long. I’m not sure if impressive would be the right word, but it takes a special kind of person to put that much work into screwing something up.
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