Sponsored by The Tire Rack

[cohenfive]

this is more of a story where i learned a few things than a question...but i found it interesting, if also way too complicated...

i bought my 11 e92 a year ago with 2k miles from a local wholesaler. the original owner of the car had taken it into les schwab (local tire/wheel retailer) and had a set of tsw wheels installed along with p zeros. they left the front size alone, but in the back they put on 10.5j wheels with 285/30/19 tires. being pzeros, after 10k miles they are now totally shot, although the fronts still have at least 50% tread left. i want to switch to conti extreme contact dw's so decided to order them from tirerack. i asked about sizing on those wheels, and found out a couple of things...
1. the 285's with the oem size front (245/35) did not agree with the bmw recommendation for front/rear stagger..i guess schwab didn't realize they were mismatching sizes.
2. i wanted to drop back to the oem size anyway, since they were cheaper and obviously fit the way bmw wanted the tires to fit on the car. however, tirerack for some reason didn't have any info on whether i could fit the 265/35 onto the 10.5j wheel...in fact when i called conti the first answer was that this size should only be mounted on a 9 to 10 inch wheel. however, i pointed out that other tire companies were ok with a 10.5j for this tire size, so he went back to the source docs, and found out that in fact their website was wrong...and they were ok with the 265 on a 10.5j wheel....whew!

so i learned a couple of things about tire/wheel fitment in this, and i can now have oem sizes on the car. i'll have the pzero in front and dw in the rear, but the next time the rears wear out my guess is that the fronts will be about gone as well, and then i'll get a full set of dw's...

in the midst of this, i had to crawl under the car to read the wheel size on the inside of the wheel, and in the process i also found out that my car has a magnaflow exhaust installed which i didn't know the car had. the exhaust sounded 'different' to me but the dealer never mentioned the exhaust upgrade for some reason (they forgot probably). i guess that's a bonus, but i agree with others who say the exhaust gives the car a 'drone' sound around 2k rpm...but when you put the foot down, the car sounds amazing.

so i wasted probably 2 hours in all, but ended up learning a couple of things about fitment, got the tire selection and size i was hoping to, and found out the car has an aftermarket exhaust in the process.