Which Tire and Wheel Size Combination is the Fastest?

The focus of this article is for performance and track use only. For normal street driving: we advise you use your vehicle, wheel and tire's recommended pressures and fitments.

There's a philosophical discussion to be had about the human need to push further and faster beyond every limit we can discover. Arriving at a physical limitation and saying "Great! Now, what lies beyond that?" has motivated humanity since before recorded history. The ever-changing pursuit of speed has pushed drivers, tuners, and mechanics to tinker with nearly every attribute they can on a vehicle: from gutting every piece of comfortable equipment for ideal power-to-weight ratios to all manner of mad-science engine swaps, vehicle modding and redesigns, there's almost nothing enthusiasts won't do to find any time "left on the table"…and then try to find just a little bit more. So, it's little surprise today that most ways to squeeze every bit of performance from a vehicle have been explored, tested and discussed.

One lingering, but hard-to-answer question throughout the years has dealt with wheels, or rims, as they are often colloquially known. Namely, the relationship between a wheel's width and the tire mounted on it. Conventional wisdom says that "wider is better", and often leads to drivers trying to stuff the biggest tire possible onto a car they can get away with, but the tough question ultimately is: "does it make it faster?"

The problem is: answering that in a definitive way involves burning up dozens of tires around a track while controlling for a myriad of conditions and performance variables. That's a big ask, even if you have regular access to a controlled track. Thankfully, that's exactly the kind of question Tire Rack is here for.

Our testing covered several tire and wheel width combinations, and ultimately what we know partially supports the conventional wisdom of "wider is better", but it's a bit more nuanced. There are a lot of factors in the equation and no single setup is universally the "best" available option. However, one prevailing truth emerged throughout: proper support is the most important factor we've found for performance. A wider tire on a narrow wheel made for a slower drive than the inverse in dry conditions. Even more interesting, in the wet, the slimmest available tires on the slimmest available wheels, outperformed or tied almost every other combination we tested. The only exceptions being an equally-narrow tire mounted on a wider rim width. A slightly narrower tire, if well supported, will simply outperform wider tires in the rain that would leave it behind on a dry day.

In general, the best results come from properly paired wheel and tire combinations. Our testing has shown that avoiding the extremes of a pinched or stretched tire by properly supporting it with an appropriate wheel yields the best results, with some time to be gained situationally by a slight stretch, if anything. Pinching a tire yields the worst performance, so we'd recommend avoiding that in favor of maintaining proper support, and that is perhaps the most important point of all here: If you plan on upgrading your tires to a wider stance, budget for a wheel upgrade also.

That's ultimately the best advice we can give - wider is mostly better in dry conditions; there's a reason Formula 1 cars aren't running skinny tires after all, but it's part of a total package. Support your tires and they'll do the same.

This article briefly covers and discusses the information presented in our Wheel/Tire Width test, and we highly recommend you watch that video for more!