Campagnolo Wheels & Tires

[Sam Danenberger IV]

Huib-

They are EURO tires
The size & type you gave is not listed by any US vendor/supplier.
So the hunt continues.
Thanks for your continued assistance!!

Sam

[Huib]

Well, can't you import them?

I bet the original 145R14 X tires were also euro tires. American cars at the time weighed at least twice as much as a Fulvia. The 145R14 could not possibly have been a US tire.

[P. de R. Leclercq]

I am wondering if 145s are going to be any good on 5.5" wheels.

For me, the best choice would be a 165/70. Same rolling diameter, and based on reports, with no loss of sensitivity.

Paul

[Huib]

The 145's are certainly not recommended for 5,5J wheels. They are optimal for the standard 4,5J wheels.
For the 5,5J wheels the 165 is ideal. However the scrub radius is way off

[Sam Danenberger IV]

Huib & Paul-
To clear up some confusion-
I am talking about two different tires for two different sets of wheels.
One set for the Campys 5.5"x 13" what is best? Toyo?
Set Two for the original steel wheels 145/14
Hope this clears up some mixed signals I might have given.
Thanks
Sam

[P. de R. Leclercq]

OK.

For the Campagnolos it depends on what you want to do. The trouble is that the choices in 14" are limited - 13" and 15" are much better served.

For the 4.5" wheels I still recommend the 165/70s (and I am well aware of Huib's views on this one) but the standard S1 Fulvia is really great on the 165/70s - honestly!

Paul

[P. de R. Leclercq]

Whoops! 13". OK try Yokohama A048Rs. My friend and client rallies her Fanalone on these and swears by them

Paul

[Sam Danenberger IV]

Paul-

Thanks for your valuable input!

The Campys are 13" wheels( 13" x 5.5") primarily for touring and maybe some non-competitve rallying and lots of drives on the twisties!

I had some good Vredesteins Sprints 165/70 on standard steel wheels on another Coupe I once owned and they seemed fine, I just like the way the original equip 145/14 Michelin X look and feel on the car.
The suspension was engineered for theses skinny tires!!

I just want the option to run the steel standard wheels or the super looking Campys .

Best Regards,
Sam

[Huib]

I never drive tires nor schock absorbers nor engines. I do drive cars, very fine cars, very well balanced cars. Fulvia's to be exact.

Personally I am more interested in the balance of the car as a whole. If anything is outstanding such as good grip or good shock absorbers or a very fast engine, it means in my eyes simply that a balance is disturbed.
Balance means you don't notice the individual parts untill they are removed or changed.

As a student I worked part time with the importer of Quad amplifiers and electrostatic loudspeakers. I still have those. In the late sixties we had a dealer who once a year rented the nearby hotel and invited all importers to demonstrate their equipment for the people the dealer had invited.

I noticed several things:
a) people walked by the electrostatic loudspeakers for the first three or four times without stopping. I started asking questions and found this was because they sounded so naturally. Nothing was standing out to draw their attention.
b) if someone said that a loudspeaker had good treble or good bass, it had (to the ears of a more experienced person) too much treble or too much bass. In fact a few years later loudspeaker manufacturers started to discover this too and designed their loudspeakers to have too much treble and too much bass. As a consequence Quad altered the bass and treble controls to easily compensate for this. And also recording studio's compensated. As a result their are many records from late seventies onwards for which there is no way you can have quality equipement produce a balanced sound. I still have many original pressings from the sixties and seventies and some of them also on CD. Invariably the CD's have inferior quality. Technically the CD may be superior but the balance is gone.
To stray a bit further, when we have the kids over for dinner, they like it very much when I play a record with scratches. "It sounds so very much like the real thing". The car industry has sort of fallen into the same swamp.

People tell me that this all happened because in europe in the sixties we also started to train people to become managers (marketing managers, acounting managers, engineering managers etc etc etc) like in the USA. Mind you, these were the days that europeans thought that everything in America was better.

In short I would cheat, steal and murder to get the original Michelin X tires in 145R14. The Flaminia and Flavia people are very lucky as they can still get the X tire, the mother of all radial tires.

But Paul is right. Some 165/70R14 tires are not that bad on a 4,5J14 wheel.

[Peter Cripps]

Very interesting discussion. Here in the US, many of these tire sizes are not generally available, as Sam has pointed out.

My Fulvia came with 185/70R14 tires, which I think are far too big for the standard steel wheels. Still, it is by far the nicest-steering car in our 'fleet', which includes a Fiat 124 spider, a Mazda RX-7, and a BMW330i.

Coker Tire does offer a 165HR14 Michelin XAS, but it's rather expensive at $164 per tire. However, all the usual retailers (e.g. Tire Rack) show even the 165/70R14 size as being unavailable, let alone any 145 sizes.

Huib, regarding Quads, I have a pair of ESL63s which I'm very happy with. Although, I've had to replace a couple of the mid-range modules over the years. Those glued-in membranes don't last for ever!

Peter