Steelies for Winter Tires
 

Hello everyone. Been lurking a while, driving my car since June and figured it was time to chime in...

Need to swap out to Blizzack snow tires in a few months. Figured Tire Rack would set me up no problems. WRONG! Seems they do not have any steel wheel options for the FRS.

Are the rims unique to this car?

Called the dealer and they have not heard of any steel rims either.

What are others doing for this?

I've not been a fan of Alloys for winter due to corrosion and snow packing leading to unbalanced wheels.

Well, I know the base model 86 comes with steelies in Japan, although that might be stupidly expensive to import.

They should have 16" steelies available. I priced out a set earlier, but I'm leaning towards just getting some Rota Grids or Motegi SP10 rims for winter just because I don't like the looks of steelies and our winters aren't too bad. May have to set your car as a BRZ though if it's not showing up as an FR-S. Probably just a DB glitch where they haven't associated the 2 cars.

The bolt pattern and offset seems to be fairly common on Subaru vehicles. Perhaps a scrap yard Impreza would be a good donor? You would have to check to see what the offsets are for various Subaru models and years.

I just went to Tire Rack's website and it took me about 30 seconds to find steel winter wheels. 16x6.5, $58 each. I looked under BRZ-> winter -> wheels. They appear to be the exact same ones I bought for our Forester a couple of years ago.

This was the suggestion from the Tire Rack tech. I would have ordered if I knew for a fact that the 16" rims would go on the car. I assume they are hub-centric as required.

I expect that this will be the way to go since next option is $150/wheel

Now I just need to confirm that if I dont run TPS the traction control will still turn off when I want it to, or I will be stuck in a lot of snow drifts.

Thanks.

Traction control and stability control work the same whether or not you have TPMS installed in the new wheels/tires. My summmer/autocross wheel/tire setup does not have TPMS, the light is on all the time, and everything works the same as when it had the stock wheels/tires on with TPMS.

edit: hubcentric wheels aren't required, but they do give a lot of people some extra peace of mind. Anyways, I went out in my garage and measured the hub bore of the 16x6.5 5x100 steelies I got for our Forester from Tire Rack a few years back, and I measured the hub bore of the stock wheels, and it is the same, so the Tire Rack steelies are hubcentric, at least in this application