Tire Weight
I don't know if this is post worthy or not but I recently had my eyes opened regarding tire weights.
I wanted to get rid of the 19" Pret wheels and 235/35/19 Continental ContiSportContact 5P tires on my Golf R and go with a light weight 18" wheel and a better tire. Mainly I wanted a meatier sidewall for our fantastic YYC roads as well as more grip.
I spent nearly a month researching different wheels, I wanted something rotary forged and light without breaking the bank. I finally settled on a set of Konig Hypergrams which weigh in at 17.4lbs, that's 4.6lbs lighter than the factory 19" wheels. Fantastic I thought, that's a substantial, nearly 21% savings in un-sprung, rotational mass. Well not so fast.
The factory 235/35/19 Conti Tires weigh 21lbs each, and the tire I was thinking of going to was the Bridgestone Potenza RE11 (the RE11 is more tire than I need on this car but there was some great prices on them) which in 235/40/18 trim weighs in at 27lbs, that would have meant my light weight wheel & tire package would actually be nearly 1.5lbs heavier than stock
Needless to say I thought I'd take a closer look at weights of some of the Max & Extreme Performance Summer tires. And to my surprise they vary form as little as 22lbs for the Dunlop Sport Maxx RT to as much as 27lbs for the aforementioned RE11. And none of these are run flats, I can only imagine how much more those porkers would be.
Anyways I ended up settling on a set of Michelin PSS's, I've ran them on my vette for street duty for years and they're a good tire. They weigh in at 23lbs meaning the new package is 40.4lbs (3.8lbs lighter than stock per corner).
TLDR: If you're going to spend some big dollars on a light weight wheel it's probably a good idea to check the weight of the tire you plan to run
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