anyone know the benifits of lightweight wheels?

[Biggie™]

Originally Posted by fu_im_from_texas

Is 3% a huge difference?

Well, let's step back and look at this with a tad bit wider view. The Yaris isn't a dragster, nor is it an exceptional road racer. But when taking into account the fact it has a steering wheel and brakes, we'll head towards the road race/autoross (along with aggressive street driving) side of things when looking at the benefits of smaller wheels on a Yaris' over all performance.

Take that 3% improvement and factor it into not just acceleration, but braking and turning. In a 0-60 pull, you saved 0.22 of a second. Not really that much time. But that was when looking at less than 10 seconds of performance data.

Now go to an autocross. And for arguments sake we'll say the Yaris ran a 60 second lap. And to make it even more interesting we'll drop the performance gain of the wheels to only 1% do to the fact the car wont always be accelerating, decelerating or turning (even thou it will be doing two of these simultaneously for most of the event). That's only a performance gain of 6/10th of a second overall. But as anyone that has autocrossed knows, that is actually a HUGE amount of time when competing. Now go to a race track where lap times are a minute forty or more and you've just beat your previous time by over a second. Kind of scary when you start to think about it...