New Summer 2014 Mazda3 Wheels On Order

[alligatorman]

There's not much point in that, anymore. The winter tires on the OEM wheels now are probably significantly heavier than the OEM tires, and heavier than any summer-only tires I will likely buy. I won't have a chance to weigh an OEM wheel without a tire. Maybe I could ask Discount Tire to do that the next time I have to replace the snow tires. That will be a while, though.

Well then if we can look up the tire weight on tirerack or another site that would be easy to subtract from the package

 

[Chibana]

The 18x8" wheels on my RX-8 weighed 24.something lbs. according to our house scale (I don't remember the "something"). According to Brian Goodwin of Goodwin Racing, the OEM wheels supposedly weighed 21lbs., but if that was right, our house scale is pretty inaccurate.

 

[concept]

House scales at low weights are not normally accurate. A postal-type scale is a good tool for this purpose. Even 21 lbs is kinda heavy.

Sent from my Windows Phone 8X by HTC using Tapatalk

 

[herndonb63]

Hi Chibana,
How do you like your OZ Alleggerita HLT wheels on your 2014 Mazda 3 after six months? I just got a Mazda 3s GT myself! Love the car, but thinking about chopping ~10 pounds off of each wheel, that's gotta be noticeable in acceleration, braking, steering, ride, even fuel economy maybe? Is there any downside, besides the cost of course? Which tire did you end up going with? It looks like Continental and even Hankook have some nice choices...
Thanks for any info you have on your experience...
-Brian

 

[Chibana]

I love the wheels. I noticed a difference--the tires spin more easily now! I actually stopped stomping so hard on the gas from a stop because of this. It should reduce acceleration times a bit, and make the steering a bit more responsive. Grassroots Motorsports recently did tests with their NA Miata and light wheels. They theorized that previous tests didn't show much of an improvement in 0-60 mph times because the cars were heavy and made lots of power and torque. So they did tests on the first gen Miata, which is very light and makes little power. They tested with two sets of wheels, the lighter of which were 11 pounds lighter each. If I remember correctly, 0-60 mph times dropped by 0.6s, a pretty big difference. The 2.5L Mazda3 is quite a bit heavier and more powerful, so I wouldn't expect as large a difference with a 10 pound-per-wheel drop, but maybe a couple tens of a second.

I still have the OEM all-season tires on those wheels. Once they wear out, I'm planning on going with the BFGoodrich g-Force Sport COMP-2. They've won both comparisons I've read at Tire Rack. Supposed to be a great summer-only tire at a reasonable price.