Should you buy OEM wheels for your car?

Tires may be the most important part of your car, but for most people, Shopping for tires is annoying at best and super frustrating at worst. This gets tricky if you’re a car enthusiast buying performance tires because you have a lot of information to deal with, and much of it is subjective.

Some cars, like many BMWs and Porsches, come with what are called “marked rims”, but what are they and why are they really cool? To start answering that question, we should take a look at a specific car to keep things simple, so let’s start with the BMW M4. BMW has partnered with Michelin for its original equipment tires. And since the M4 is a sports car, BMW will go with an original equipment performance summer tire, and in this case, that means the sport pilot 4S.

Michelin’s Pilot Sport 4S is a much-loved summer performance tire with a dual-compound design that tends to fit the character of many fun-to-drive cars, but BMW and specifically BMW’s M division chassis engineers wanted to take the PS4S and optimize it for the chassis of the M4. This is where marked tires come in. BMW’s Star Marked tire program has BMW development engineers and drivers work with Michelin engineers and testers to iterate on a tire’s design until it’s a big, round, black bowl of gruel. of Goldilocks.

The tire development process with Michelin and BMW M is deeply cooperative. According to BMW M engineer and race car driver Frank Weishar, BMW engineers and Michelin engineers often ride together during test days at places like the Nurburgring, with each final marked tire easily seeing between 30,000 and 50,000 miles of development. sometimes driving up to seven iterations. before being signed. Engineers begin the development process by using the previous generation of cars to begin testing, tuning it to the new car’s lineup specifications, which are decided well in advance, and then modifying the wheel and tire pressures and sizes to find the right fit. better balance.

For the M4, the engineers ended up making a bunch of changes. Notably, where the unmarked replacement tire has two rubber compounds, the star-marked version has four and also has a different construction that prioritizes dry grip, feedback, and quick reaction to management inputs. The standard PS4S tire sacrifices some of that dry grip to improve wet grip and some of that feedback for comfort because it has to work well on an almost unlimited number of vehicles.

Ed Gliss, a subjective test driver and product category manager for Michelin, told me that when they are available, many performance car drivers tend to revert to the OEM marked tire that came with their car. Part of this is likely due to convenience, as many new vehicles are dealer serviced and obviously the dealer will push branded tires, but also because tires make a huge difference in the way you drive a car and if you fall in love with them your car because of its dynamics, there is no substitute for OEM for many. Of course, this is great for new cars, but tire programs marked for older cars are even cooler.

For example, Porsche’s marked tire program is called N-Spec. I found this when I was shopping for tires for my 20 year old 911. See, 911s tend to have odd tire sizes, given their unique drivetrain design and its effect on vehicle dynamics. When it was new, my car probably would have come equipped with Michelin Pilot Sport 2 tires and wouldn’t I know it? you can still buy N-Spec PS2 todayeven though the PS2 is many generations old in terms of design and technology.

If you go to Tire Rack and put my 2003 Porsche 911 Carrera on, your two main choices will be both N-Spec tires, and the benefit of these is, again, preserving the feel of the car as it was when it was new. With the Michelins, the PS2 hasn’t existed in a vacuum all that time, so it’s seen some minor changes and improvements over the years, but it’s very much the same tire it was in 2003. Of course, my car is modified with improvements. Suspension and a performance lineup, so 2003 handling characteristics aren’t a priority for me, which means I ended up choosing the aftermarket version of the Pilot Sport 4S, but the option to be there is awesome.

Of course, branded tires and OEM tire programs can go even further than BMW’s work with the PS4S. A great example of this is Bridgestone’s completely bespoke, fully banana Dueler AT002 tire for The new Lamborghini Huracán Sterratowhich took place in less than a year.

This tire has an even more demanding set of performance targets to hit because it’s the OEM tire on a 640-hp, off-road-focused, four-wheel-drive Lamborghini sports car with no room for a spare tire. That means it’s the first W-rated (meaning good for 168 mph) all-terrain tire ever made, and it’s made in a 19-inch size, which probably hasn’t been seen on a Lamborghini since. the first Bush was president. It shares a similar shell design to the Potenza Sport from the regular Huracan.

Purchasing an OEM branded tire for your Sterrato is a key part of maintaining the utterly unique and utterly unhinged driving characteristics that Lamborghini designed into the Sterrato. But of course, Bridgestone also makes OEM tires for Huracans that aren’t designed to see dirt. The two flavors of Potenza Sport on offer, Street and Race, also differ considerably from the aftermarket Potenza Sports (which I have on my 911 today), which, like all aftermarket tires, is much less constrained by the government regulations on noise, tread. depth, construction and effect on fuel economy.

So now that I’ve given you a hose of information, what’s your conclusion as someone who presumably spends time shopping for performance tires rather than just inputting your vehicle info and sorting for the cheapest? It’s simple. If you want to retain your car’s factory driving dynamics and your manufacturer offers a marked tire, buying it is your best bet. If you want to experiment with how your car feels, you have many replacement tire options that will give you different characteristics and may better suit your driving style.

The good thing is, other than randomly throwing all the nameless stations on your M3 or M4 and never checking your tire pressure, there really is no wrong answer, so get out there and have some fun.