Whether your pursuit of speed involves straight-line shots or curves that twist fore and aft, traction is the key to making the most out of your car's capabilities. As the old racer's saying goes, you can only be as fast as your tires will allow. One of the most basic tenants of improving traction is simply getting more rubber on the ground. Plus, you get the bonus that wide tires just make any car look tougher.
We borrowed a set of 335/30R18 Hoosiers from the CorteX Racing #45 American Iron Extreme car to ensure we had enough fenderwell to fit our tire of choice. Once we eliminate the fender lip, we should be in good shape and ready to get our custom Forgeline wheels.
The trouble is that it's a balancing act squeezing modern wide wheels and tires under vintage quarter-panels. Most stock wheeltubs were designed when 235-series tires were considered really wide. With just the right offset most cars can take 9- or 10-inch-wide wheels with 275-305 series tires, but oftentimes in the pursuit of more width with stock wheelwells and lowered stance the question becomes how much tire rubbing you're willing to deal with over bumps and through corners. Our problem is that our plans call for much more section width than that; 312mm of magnificent meat to be precise.
To squeeze in that much rubber we've only got two options: flare the fenders, or mini-tub the wheelwells. For now, we're opting for the latter. Nowadays, there are a few companies that make high-quality prestamped mini-tubs that can cut dramatically down on the labor involved, like Detroit Speed and Engineering's Deep Tub kit available for Camaros and Novas. By all means, if you've got that option for your ride, save yourself some time and order the DSE kit. But what do you do if a set of deep tubs aren't available, or perhaps just aren't deep enough? You go back to the old ways of slicing and splicing.
That's our plan for Max Effort's rear wheelwells, and it works on the same principle as the premade mini tubs, i.e. we're just going to make the stock tub deeper by cutting away the inner floor and adding metal to the tub. Of course, there's more to consider than that, and with the help of Ryan Kertz at Kertz Fabrication we're going to show you some of the things to consider when mini-tubbing any car.
