20 mm spacers on daily driver - any drawbacks?

SiMuL said:

You made four points, so I'll address them respectively:

1) The nature of the forces acting on the wheels, spacers, and hubs invalidates this argument. There are virtually no forces acting on the lugs in a normally operating vehicle, other than the force it takes to hold the surfaces together, which is almost constant, even in cornering.

Unless you smack a curb sideways, the differences in strength using spacers or not is negligible. It's definitely not enough to even worry about when it comes to using them.

2) I agree 100%. It will take longer to check all of the lugs, but how often do you really need to do this? And is it so much trouble that you'd rather not have the stance you're after? For me, it's way more important for my car to look just the way I want vs an extra 30-40 minutes to check my lugs twice a year.

3) This is true as well. I couldn't tell you how much an extra inch on both sides will change the performance of the vehicle, or if having the wider track has negated any downsides with the wider scrub radius. I do not know much about suspension geometry to debate this. I do, however, know from my own (limited) experience that I did not notice any difference at all using spacers.

Maybe this is something you would feel more in a track environment.

4) We're talking VERY little weight here and the weight is concentrated in the center of the rotating mass, which reduces it's overall detrimental effects. Again, this is such a minimal disadvantage, it's hardly worth mentioning.

This video goes into the major concerns you might have on how spacers affect the overall characteristics of the vehicle:



And here's a blog post in regards to tracking your car with spacers. The consensus is that it is not a big deal:

http://nickscarblog.com/reviews/are-wheel-spacers-safe-for-the-track

He even points to another article where they show that they're also safe for hardcore offroading, too.

It all comes down to making sure you use quality spacers and hardware and always match the lug seats to your wheels (whether ball or cone shaped seats).

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OKC S550 said:

Interested if anyone has a real life example of spacers causing some sort of issue while being used on track. I tracked my oem wheels with 25mm spacers at all 4 corners and now track my 19x11 wheels with a 20mm spacer up front. This is in addition to using 25mm spacers at all 4 wheels when daily driving for the past two years.

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