FlightService wrote:
...The reason is you can't find a decent small rim tire selection anymore for reasonable street tires...who in the planning/shake down phase has optimized their wheel tire package, what did you choose and why?
That depends greatly on what criteria one uses to evaluate "reasonable" and "optimized".
In typical smaller car widths, 15 has slightly less availability than 16 has significantly less availability than 17. However, that is focusing the selection based on wheel diameter without regard to tire diameter. I consider there to be 3 main tire diameter ranges consisting of ~23, ~24, and ~25. In my opinion, this is where the selection process should actually start. if the concern is tire sizes drying up for a given wheel size, when changing wheel sizes it will still be much easier to keep overall tire dimensions similar rather than changing tire dimensions which has farther reaching effects.
I do believe that thanks to the large contingent of older Miatae, Civies, etc that are driven hard to this day, the 23 size will have pretty good staying power for at least a decent while longer. Here I do think the 15's might actually outlast the 16's, but technically it still provides another option. For 24 there are current production cars using these, so they'll definitely be around a bit longer in both 16's and 17's. The reigning king for availability though, both now, and as far as the forseeable future goes, is 25. Currently there are tires abound in both 16's and 17's, with no end in sight yet for the 17's.
I currently am designing and building around 23F/25R, simply because that's the setup I bought and never got to use for a previous project attempt. I'm pretty sure I could easily enough accommodate 24F/25R if necessary. But as I'm trying to finalize key suspension design details, I am (again) strongly considering the move to 25 all around, as that would be easier to implement now than later...Even if at some cost. I would definitely like to keep the smallest size wheels available for any given diameter, and will avoid 17's for as long as possible. But I'm also making sure that I would still be able to go the 17's route, if the need were to ever arise during the course of my relationship with this car. Because depending however long that might be, the eventual change to 17's is probably just going to be as inevitable as was the migration from 13's to 15's.
Of course we'll see if I still feel this way if/when I ever manage to get this car on the road, but I also have the advantage of not necessarily requiring sub-200TW for my intended driving characteristics as well.