Just placed my order on Tirerack for a set of 17x7 Kosei K1 TS dark grey wheels and 4 245/40/17 Dunlop Star SPEC tires for the autox season. These wheels weigh 14.6 lbs a piece:

Kosei K1 TS


Dunlop Star SPECS


First time I'll ever autox on a competive tire in my 5 years of autoxing. Now I can't whine about my crappy Nittos anymore.

I like those wheels, how are those tires? sticky?

I like them rims, Kosei has good prices to.

Are the narrower tire's better for auto-x?

Those are for my WRX. Actually Tirerack declined mounting the wider tire to the narrower wheel. I had my order cancelled and I'll probably go with a Bridgestone RE-11 225 width. The Dunlops are what the street touring classes used last year. This year they seem to be using the RE-11's so I'll probably go with those.

245/40/17 tires are too much tire for a 7" rim.

I am running 245/50/16 drag radials on a 7" rim and the tires are bulging but its ok because I have a lot of sidewall. Those tires are lower profile, making it even tougher to fit on a rim that width. 225s are actually considered technically too wide, but you could run them on those rims.

I would think for autox you'de want to run wider rims/tires unless your running in a class that requires you to run the same width tires as stock

There is class reasons for sticking with my stock size wheels. Otherwise I'd get 17x8's and put on 245 tires. I got some other opinions and decided against the 245 because it will cause tread deformation. In the normal classes many people in the nats stretch wide r comp tires on their narrow wheels, but they don't have tread so they don't have problems with that.