Heavy versus Light wheels - Acceleration Tests and their results

[swerve2007]

I agree with you on the feel part in a sense, but the sensation of better feeling from aftermarket to stock wheels is only evident when you make the change. That sensation is basically gone after you are riding around with them on for awhile and your mind has adjusted to it. It just like buying a fast car, it feels fast but then you've become use to it until you drive something faster. I mean I have driven vehicles that felt faster than the NSX (with similar, but not equal of course power to weight ratio), but that was because the torque deliver is not as smooth and linear as the NSX. This gave the feeling of a really fast car when in fact it was not that fast.

Butt dyno has always been frowned upon and I think a Butt G meter is just as bad. I will say that nothing feels like driving the NSX, well, nothing I have driven yet, and I have driven many different vehicles. It is very precise and smooth, elegantly balanced. With that said, the change from 18/19 wheels to stock wheels gave the impression that I dropped massive weight but that sensation soon evaporated and real world numbers proved to be minimal like you said. Ride quality was not even that much better, but then again I may have over inflated the tires. I actually prefer the feeling of wider, lower profile tires also. It felt a bit tighter to me but no big difference in overall feeling besides grip. I guess everyone will eventually fall into the compromise of 17/18s and that is what I generally prefer now.

you did state how different the car felt to you when you changed to oem wheels- light, sharp and balanced- thats the feel i refer to and thats the feel that was intended to be present- communicative and letting you know what the front end is doing- that is what i was refering to and i was not starting a conversation about what is a personal preference or what feels faster or what the perceived Gs are etc.
the oem steering feedback (the on-center-feel, turn-in, slip on edge of adhesion etc) is a quantifiable entity dependant on wheels, tires and suspension as developed by honda. any deviation from the formula has a real effect- as you know even the tires were specially developed to enhance the feedback. like i said, if you want to 'get used to' that feedback feeling being gone, your choice. Allowing your brain to adjust still does not replace the missing feedback no matter how you want to justify that- it is still not there- if you want to adjust to it being gone, it is your choice, i don't have an issue. maybe i am just sensitive to what the car 'tells' me and am not willing to sacrifice that for the sake of personal esthetics, unless the hardware is very carefully chosen. from my experience, unless you are racing and need the all-out grip and are making a ton of other decisions and compromises to go faster, going to non-oem-sized harware and tires is a downgrade on the street-bound nsx in terms of the synergy of the setup. thats all.

 

[drmanny3]

Very interesting post to say the least. I also agree this would be an interesting article to publish. I feel it would get a lot of attention. As for the lighter wheels allowing faster acceleration. I can only reflect on my cycling activities. Way back when I use to ride a lot, I recall changing wheels and tires to cut out weight. Certainly there is a bit of a different with bicycle wheels versus car wheels, however I think the basic principles are the same. With a light pair of rims with fewer spokes and coupled with a light weight tire I found it easier to speed up from a stop then when I had the more traditional wheels with 36 spokes and a heavier tires. So it is all about acceleration and overcoming the forces of inertia. It takes less energy to overcome the inertia associated with a light rim wheel and tire combination then it does with a heavy rim and heavy tire. The inertia is mass related. I guess in the tests that you ran the instruments are not sensitive enough and we may not be measuring what is really the correct measurement. If someone could open their physics book, you can calcualte the energy required to twist a mass. Our cars have so much horsepower that the mass difference in wheels is problably not significant enough to make a statistical difference. I would think that the slope of the curve from a dyno might show the difference but perhaps the error is too great. Anyway, I still think the lighter wheels are the way to go.

Manny