historical accuracy, was: <VV> Tire gurus

[airvair]

Mike,

All I can say is that you are definately showing your youth. You are too 
used to seeing modern cars with "rubber band" tires of 50, 40, 30, and 
even 25 section that you don't know any different. Cars didn't always 
show all rim and no tire. Way back in the bone age when Corvairs were 
new, tires were a large part of the profile looks of a car. The 
Corvair's 7.00-13 tires have a HUGE sidewall, almost half the diameter! 
You need to see a Corvair with the correct 7.00-13 tires to appreciate 
that. Nothing today even comes close, which is the problem.

Having been around Corvairs since their introduction, I can speak from 
experience. Which is why I have always maintained that even a 185/80R-13 
is too small for Corvairs. Bruce Schug presented a great assessment of 
the situation in a recent post.

-Mark

mhicks130 at cox.net wrote:

>I don't know, the 185-80's look fine to me.  If anything even they look like there's too much sidewall on them (unless they're whitewalls).  Do they look the same as the bias ply?  No, but the biggest difference in looks to me isn't the OD, which I'm sure my eyes couldn't detect anyway, but the profile.  The bias plys have that distinctive shape with the treads looking like they're on a little cliff.  I've never seen a radial with that shape.  I'll say this though, if they had radials back when the Corvair was new, they would have used them.  Even if Chevy would have been to cheap to put them on new, when it came time for replacements  people would have put on radials.  They're just so much better.  It is hard to look at old cars tires without thinking the tires look too big though because of today's standards.  Even disregarding the 35 series "rim protectors", all cars today come with much lower profile tires than they used to.  The 175-70 R13's on my '85 VW Golf looked lik!
>ed balloons compard to the 215-50 R15's on my Passat station wagon.  Does the Passat "need" 50 series tires? I don't think so, I remember when only Turbo Carreras came with 50 series tires.  Now that's considered a "normal" profile.  I'm not a concours type so my opinion may not be too relevant but I still say the 185-80 whitewalls look good.
>
>mike
>  
>