19's look sick, but it robs my mpg. Oh well!

my mpg has stayed the same

I cant even help but smoke the tires all the way through 1st gear and and a little bit of 2nd gear with the stock 17's. Too much power
The 19's keep it manageable.

Agreed. I know the stock suspension and stock sport 17s will give the best ride, comfort and acceleration. However for looks, you can't beat the Rays on z front and cpe g rear springs. It rides really nice for the 35 series tires and 19" wheels, even with the mild drop. I look at my G, especially within a week of a hand wash, and I just can't see myself going back to the 17s --the rays are so flush to the fenders and have an eye-catching finish that is not in your face like chrome but still looks classy and sporty--I love it. Btw, now with my Z, I don't care about going "fast" and I'm looking for this G to be a bit more comfortable so I'm putting the stock mp on to cut down drown and the ride like I said is nice. On my next set of tires I will definitely do a dismount, side to side rotation up front every 4 k mi ( I drive 5 k mi a year in the g), so as to keep even wear and keep them quiet.


before............................................ ...after

Everyone brought up some good points. I think we all in a agreeance that the coupe 19s are one of best stock wheel out there for a mainstream car. While I love the way they look to death, the over sensitivity and dartiness is starting to get annoying. I am wondering also how much the wheel offset plays a part. I guess a good test might be to compare the stock sedan 17s against the staggered setup of the stock coupe 17s. Does anyone have this setup?

Also I noticed that a lot comparisons between the 19s and 17s are based on totally different tires. Almost any mid grade summer tire would kick the stock Turanza's butt. That's a given. I would be curious to see how it would drive with the same quality summers on the 17s? Anyone tried that? It's kinda hard to do cause not too many performance tires at the OEM size. I don't think they make the RE050A in that size.

There was also a comment about the coupe and sedan being identical but if that is true why didn't they ever make that setup for the sport package? Maybe it was because they didn't think sedan owners wanted to deal with different size tires.

Based on everyone's comments I am starting to think the 18s are the way to go. But then question is which wheel. I am not that fond of the stock 18s and I want to avoid staggered setups of the coupe's.

^^ IMO The OEM 18's don't look that much different in style than the Rays 19's.

If you don't want to use the forged oem 19s, then anything other than the 350z oem track edition 18s will be heavier and impart more of a weight penalty.

If you can find some aftermarket 18s like the Enkei RP-1s or something, that might be okay. But the track editions would be the way to go IMHO. They are staggered but finding a set of tires you can flip right - left vs front - back will extend the tire life the best. You could run all the same sizes on the Z track editions and flip back/front or flip directions etc.. But that would require demounting/mounting. Provided you have the right tire tread design that allows such a thing.

I've discussed all this in my own search for tires on the coupe 19s.

I thought about getting the same size tires for the 19s but I don't think that it fixes the handling issue. Part of the dartiness could possibly from the staggered fitment or the fact that the wheels are not the proper offset. Anyone have more understanding of the effects of wheel offset and suspension geometry please chime in.

People who have aftermarket 19s with the correct offset might have some useful insight.

The offset (essentially a wider track width) can influence some dartiness, but IMO, most of the dartiness comes from the tire width and stiffer sidewalls. The tires most of us run on these cars are 1" to 1.5" wider than stock. That's a lot more rubber on the road. Factor in they're much lower profile and stiff sidewalls and the car will be far more prone to tramlining. You can reduce some of this be reducing toe-in a bit.

As for the purpose of the stagger, it's to reduce oversteer. Staggered tires will increase rear end grip and will generally create more understeer. That's the main purpose for why Nissan choose to go staggered on the coupes and Zs. They probably felt the owners would push the cars harder, it looks cool, and the larger lower profile tires are more suspectible to oversteer.

Unless you are an experienced track junky, you won't notice the effects of using the same sized tires on a staggered wheel setup. That is even if there is any affects.

Agreed since the difference in stagger is only around .5" to .6". However, you've got to agree that a lot of these G/Zs with 1"+ more stagger out back are going to plow like a FWD car if you push them really hard. I laugh when I see coupes/Z with nearly 2" more stagger out back. The overall at the limit handling of that car would be Prius-like. Now if you add significantly more power than stock (ie turbo/SC), then running a fairly aggressive stagger out back could make sense.

Yes, if that stagger and tire sizes differences are big. I run 225 and 255 and I don't see much differences in my daily commute. But I can tune via my hotchkis front/rear bars.

But in this case, it's the wheel stagger only as the op was considering using the same sized tire for all.

Some of these guys are running 235-285 or 245-305. That's pretty big