I picked up my Z yesterday and spent he evening combing through the owners manual. I was quite surprised to see that the maunual says tire rotation is not appplicable for the 350 Z. This seems odd.

I believe the stock tires are unidirectional, but that should not prevent rotating front to back. I had a mid eighties Corvette with unidirectional tires and that was GM's recomendation.

Has anyone rotated tires or plan on doing so? I would think tire wear and tire life would be shortened considerably without rotation.

 

The sizes are different....can't do it

 

I was told that the tires could be switched from side to side but they have to be dismounted from the rims to be switched.

Does anyone know if this is true?

 

It is weird to explain but you could rotate the fronts with themselves and the rears with themselves. You would have to take the tires off the wheels, and then get them mounted err inside out, sort of, where like you see on the outside sidewall it says Bridgestone blah blah blah, that would be on the inside sidewall. So as the tires would still spin in the same direction. On unidirectional tires if you rotate them to where they spin the opposite direction it could cause blowouts/flats etc. The reason is the "bands" in the tires get set in their "correct" position, and if you switch the direction in which the tire spins the "bands" will try to reset their position accordingly and end up breaking the tire down on the sidewall, causing flats/blowouts etc.

This is how it was explained to me when I asked how you would go about rotating tires if you had a 10 inch wheel setup on the rear and 8 inch on the front (Mostly for drag events).

 

I do this with my track tires (Yokohama AO32R) to make them last a little longer. The outside edge wears faster than the inside edge. So the get another 2 weekends out of the tires, I'll have them turned around on the wheel, then move that wheel to the other side of the car. This also keeps the tire rolling in the same direction.

Just like Droppin_Gears explains, the inside sidewall becomes the outside sidewall. With the track tires, there is usually enough rubber on the "new" outer side of the tire to go another two weekends at the track.

Dolfan13 is also correct. The rear tires are wider than the front and are not interchangeable in the front-to-rear fashion.

I would hazard a guess that you will wear out the rear tires long before the fronts. That's the nature of a rear-wheel-drive car.




Hope that helps.

PeteH