Rim/Wheel advise?

I am sure some has to do with the name like the difference between buying an acura over a honda a lot of it is just them name but also the way it is built. Costco once sold offroad rims for trucks and suv called Pro Comps. When they came to our store to have a rep talk about the products, they were telling us that the way the rims are made are a lot better than most. something about slow soft press to make there it is a more solid rim. Their are people who want a real light weight rim for performance.

So if you find a rim that is $400 and another company makes the same looking rim for $250, definitely check the reviews online. If one companies rims are failing a lot, there are going to be some forums out there that talk all about it. But like I said before, there is a possibility that one company has great quality rims and people who buy them think they can with hold pot holes after curves after pot holes and nothing will happen to them when in reality any rim will fail if you abuse it. If you just know your roads and where the bad ones are and if you are carefull about how you drive and make sure you try your best to avoid pot holes and what nots, any rim will be good in my opinion.

I have seen people say they only want the best for there car and spend $800 a rim for their car. ME, I am buying XXR 522 gold, and they are 147 a wheel. I have bought ADR at 150 a wheel and here in texas we have horrible roads. But I know pretty much where the bad roads are in the DFW area and I always have an eye out in front of me for a bad patch of road and they never failed on me. And I am sure these XXR's wont either. TurboSocks is rocking XXR's on his my assumption must be close to the truth. I can't imagine him buying garbage wheels.

You are asking the right questions.

Any 18" alloy rim with low profile tires can be damaged significantly by a road hazard - much more than smaller rims with taller rubber. It is rare though that you can damage an OEM big rim to the point that it totally fails. Usually major rim failures happen to extremely over sized and cheap rims.

In my opinion, there are only two rim manufacturers that warrant paying over $200 a piece for them - BBS and OZ. They have been making real racing rims for real racing cars for decades. If you go to any serious sports car race all of the cars only run either one of those 2 brands of rims. Formula One cars run OZ rims. The factory BMW M3 LeMans cars run BBS rims. Their rims are extremely light and durable and are race-proven not to have a catastrophic failure even under extreme conditions.

Other than those 2 manufacturers' rims, I wouldn't pay more than $200 a rim for my VT. You can get some decent Enkei's or Sparco's or whatever for that price.

Use some common sense, if you get cheap, lightweight rims with few thin spokes that aren't BBS or OZ, they might be prone to getting bent or failing. If you are going to spend real money on rims - $400+ then get BBS or OZ.

The other thing to look at is how much faster a lighter set of rims will make your VT. Every pound you save in rim weight is 3 times more effective than saving a pound of chassis weight because rims are rotational mass and the energy needed to accelerate them is the value of pi. Yes math, geometry and trigonometry are useful later in life. So saving 4 pounds a rim is 16 pounds times pi which equals about 50 pounds. That really is not that much of a savings for a car like the VT. That is less than a passenger or the moonroof option weighs. That is about what 8 gallons of gas weighs - which is less than 3/4 of a tank of gas.

The most cost effective way to make the VT faster - especially 0-60 mph - is buying softer tires. The VT has gotten over a half second faster according to some (web) magazines by just changing tires. Once you get to know your VT you will see that you can spin the front tires pretty easily. Once you turn off the ECT and feel the turbo not hesitate you will figure out that traction is what is holding the VT back.

Enkei makes great stuff too, they make oem wheels for the Z.

Stay away from Rota wheels...