In the wheel game there are all sorts of fitment, which means you've probably seen the meme where they talk about hella fail and hella flush and stance and dropped and slammed and maxi.
I don't know, there's all these different names, but when you really break it down there are four major types of wheel fitment.Â
We decided that we would write to you about it. Because that's kind of what we do as a business, that's in our DNA here at AutoCraze.
Tucked Fitment
Let's start off with number one.So the first main style of fitment is tucked. Tucked Fitment is when the wheel and the tyre with suspension components as a whole, sit within the stock guards.
Now you can achieve that with aftermarket flares as well or over guards when people do their math wrong.
But really, tucked fender is kind of like a look, and it is a thing that's pretty, well, common. Tucked fitment is something that a lot of people do depending on the certain circumstances that they're building their car for, which kind of sounds a little bit weird when you think about it.
But here's what I mean by that, a lot of individuals would do tucked fitment for two reasons. Either one, they mess up or two, they're doing it for air suspension.
Now tucked fitment is something that is extremely common on air suspension vehicles that are looking for a tucked fitment. It usually makes the vehicle look wider,look bigger and when it's on the ground it does look really, really, good.
But tucked fitment usually results in a less wide track set up or a less wide stance set up because of them trying to fit the wheel inside the wheel well.
In addition to that, you also have to remember that if you're going for a tucked set up, you're usually looking at a higher offset wheel because it's going to bring the entyre wheel inside the guards.
So a lot of people that are running a tucked setup, especially on their air suspension carsor stock cars, are usually looking at a very flat profile wheel.
You're going to see that on a lot of different vehicles, especially the 45 to 55 offset range, but tucked is extremely common and you'll see it pretty much only in the air suspension scene, you won't see many people running a full tucked setup on coil overs, but you will see it sometimes when people make a mistake on their fitment.
Going into the next one.Tucked fitment does require you to know a couple things. A lot of times with tucked fitment you are going to have to roll your guards.
Now if you didn't know, a lot of times with your guards, you have the metal and it swoops inward but it doesn't actually swoop upward, which is the way you want it to especially when you go into air suspension, which you know if you don't fix that problem, you're ultimately going to cut into your tyres.
It also requires you to understand that you're probably going to need to have a very narrow wheel as a whole and a very flat facing profile so that you can fit everything underneath just fine.
But then of course you're going to run into, well, potentially rubbing issues especially with a suspension component.
It's not something that is the most common type of fitment but when it's done right it looks extremely, extremely good. I think those styles of tucked fitment look great on an air suspension vehicle.
It's like a smaller sport compact, something like an Audi TT looks absolutely killer with a tucked fitment in it.
Now a lot of people will argue that tucked fitment can be done with just the wheel, just the tyre, or the wheel and tyre together but in our eyes, we see it as the entyre wheel needs to be inside the guard.
Flush Fitment
The second, and probably one of the more common setups is the flush fitment, so if you guys think tucked fitment is when it's inside the fender you can assume that flush fitment means that it's on par with the guards.
Now, like we said before, a lot of people argue, what is a flush setup? You'll see people take pictures of their tucked fitment and call it flush and it's just not how it works.
People will say it's either the wheel or the tyre when really in reality it's both. You want to make sure that if you're doing a flush setup that the wheel is matching up to the guards dang near perfect.
Flush is going to give your car a meatier setup in terms of how it looks mostly because you're going to get that setup, that flush setup with both wheels and tyres.
The tyres help out so much with giving a flush strong look when you're looking at it and it's probably one of the most common setups when you're looking for like track oriented or actual use purpose for your wheel fitment.
A lot of people will run a meaty setup and that usually requires their wheels to be flush with the car.
Now, when you run a flush fitment you do need to take a couple extra things into consideration and it is something that we would probably say is a little bit tougher to achieve than your tucked fitment.
And the reason that we say that is because it requires just a little bit more math. And don't get mad at us but that's the truth. When you're looking at getting different wheel fitment you're talking in aspect of millimeters and if you're millimeters off or if you buy the wrong aspect ratio for your tyre you can completely mess up the flush look and ultimately result in a tucked look and if you're running static suspension on a wheel that has a tyre that's pulled back it's going to look a little weird. It's going to look like you're supposed to be on air suspension when you're not.
Flushed is probably one of our favourite looks and something that we see the most common use of on most cars but it's definitely something that's common.
If you're looking for something that's going to get the job done the best way possible, you can upsize your tyre size based on your wheel width. And last but not least, the flush fitment look is probably going to give you the best bang for your buck.
if you're looking at something that's maximizing the space that the wheel can be in with your tyre, you're going to result in something that's going to make your car feel better and there's going to be very few times that you're going to be able to upsize your tyre to where you start to lose traction path, especially when you're looking at a flush fitment.
It looks great, it's absolutely killer, and at the same time, it's probably going to maximize the performance if that's something that you really care about.
Poke Fitment
Now, some people don't, and that's completely cool. We're going to get into the third type of fitment which is poke fitment. If you guys didn't know, this is probably a running joke for a lot of people that when you make a mistake with your fitment, you probably have poke, and sometimes that's true.
Sometimes people mess up their offset and they're ultimately getting a wheel that sticks out half an inch instead of being inside their wheel line half an inch. But poke fitment actually has a little bit of a history and story behind it.
You see, back in the day when you're at the drag strip, there were a lot of people like your dad or grandpa that would ultimately go to the track with their car, switch out the wheels in the back, and then run it down the strip the whole day.
And what they realized is that there's very few regulations in regards to how big your rear wheels could be in relation to your guards, especially if you're just running it for fun.
As a result, people started running wider wheels in the back, and because of just the way it ultimately worked, the wheels started to poke out more, and more, and more.
Over more time, you had ultimately the domestic market starting to grow this fascination with having wider wheels in the back for both track purposes and function. And then eventually, you know, the car scene took over and they're like that looks really cool, I'm going to do that just because I have a Camaro and I want to do that. Or I have a Mustang and I want to do that.
And ultimately, that's where a lot of the poke scene comes from. Now that doesn't mean that it's not in other scenes, because everyone gets mad when we try to relate it to one specific community.
But poke fitment does have its hay day, predominantly in the muscle car scene, and for good reason, that's what people like to do.
Poke fitment is a little weird. You're also going to see it on different types of vehicles as well. VW SUV’s & 4WD’s usually have a poke fitment when they're done right and it looks pretty baller.
There are other types of people that like the poke fitment style because it gives them the more aggressive look.
Poke fitment is something that's a little bit weird because it doesn't usually require as much math. Usually when you look at your offset, you just go smaller than the recommended offset which is going to poke your wheel out.
But a lot of times you're going to thrash out your fenders and it's going to look a little bit weird if you don't do it correctly.
Now, poke fitment does look pretty cool on some muscle cars if you're looking at the right setup. A little bit of poke never hurt anybody as long as you have the suspension components that are actually going to keep your car from destroying your tyres and destorying your fender because if you have a stock fitment or you have a stock suspension with some sort of poke fitment and your car is wobbling all over the place and you go to launch it because you want to race a car at the stoplight, you're probably going to tear into your tyres and it's just no fun.
Stance Fitment
Now you're probably wondering where the fourth one is, and that is probably the most common one right now. And that's what we're going to call stance fitment.
There's probably people reading this section talking about how that's not the proper terminology and that it should be cambered, hella flush or hella fail, or whatever it is.
But ultimately when you look at it from a bare bones balcony point of view, it all kind of surrounds the same style, and that is stance fitment.
Now, stance fitment takes cues from pretty much all the other three in terms of fitting different style wheels widths to achieve a different style look but what stance has that the other ones don't is more of an aesthetic purpose rather than just a function purpose and at the same time it starts to play with a lot of things that the other three don't really need to.
When you look at stance fitment, you could say that, you know, like a Dodge Hellcat has a stance to it, which is very true but a G35 on twelve and a half wide, you know, concept 1C of 003s has stance, and that's the difference.
Every car can have a stance, but not every car has stance. When you look at the fitment, the stance fitment game, you're looking at things that include camber, tow, adjustment, driveability. You're looking at air suspension, you're looking at angles of different things to make sure that the wheels fit appropriately.
Not every stance vehicle needs to have negative twelve degrees of camber. A lot of it is just very slight camber to fit whatever they need to do.
When a car has proper stance,that's when you're really looking at just a nicely done car. But it is one of the hardest types of fitment to get.
You start playing around with things like stretch, like camber, like suspension components to make these wheels fit.
Now, you can use like camber gang and all that sort of stuff to encompass the stance fitment but overall stance just has something about it that's really unlike a whole lot else.
There's a lot of people that always talk a lot of smack against stance fitment, yet they're always the same people that ultimately look at the car at the car show on Sundays.
So in terms of stance kind of being, you know, the odd one out, it still is probably one of the most popular ones that people really enjoy looking at.
Stance fitment requires the most amount of work. Stance fitment really is something that's a little bit crazy. You're talking about different sort of degree angles and things like that, that you don't have to worry about much when you're looking at a tucked fitment or even a flush fitment.
Poke fitment is usually just something if you have a domestic vehicle or if you made a mistake, which is that's the case, you might have to go into stance fitment or buy some over flares.Â
In terms of other fitments, there definitely are others out there but those are the four most common types of fitment in terms of what you're probably going to see in the community to this day.