Wheel Spacers Fitted

Apologies for not posting for a while... that doesn't mean that I've not been busy with the car though!

A couple of weeks back I had some wheel spacers fitted. This was primarily driven by the fact that my front tires were rubbing a little on the suspension and inside the wheel arch, so I decided to push the front wheels out by an additional 3 mm. It doesn't sound like much, but it turns out to be about right... the rubbing seems to have stopped and there's not much space to push the wheels out anymore.


As you can see in the picture above, these front spacers are very slim and as such there is not need to make them hub-centric. I also purchased some new wheel bolts all 'round to accommodate the extra width... now 45 mm in length.


The spacers are specifically made to fit the Ghibli and therefore align perfectly with the PCD and also the centre bore.


The wheel is then mounted to sandwich the spacer... you should be able to make out the shiny spacer in the picture above.

On the rear I decided to be a bit more brave and pushed the wheels out by 10 mm. This extra width necessitates a hub-centric spacer, which you can see in the picture below means that there's a hub machined to stick out of the spacer. Inside the hub fits the male hub from the car and the wheel then sits onto the spacer's hub.


It probably makes more sense in the picture below where you can see the new spacer mounted onto the car's hub.


I'm happy with the end result. The car looks more aggressive and much more sporty, especially viewing it from the front three quarter, where the width of the rear tires is now much more noticeable. The car seems to handle a bit better too... I'm sure I'm getting a bit more traction now at the rear when accelerating hard out of corners.


If I can just get some more power to the back wheels, then there's space now to fit some 265 mm tires on the back! I'd also love to drop the car down a couple of centimetres, but I'm concerned that the engine sump would then be a bit too exposed?

Missing exhaust bracket fitted

Last week the replacement bracket to fix the new exhaust to the gearbox arrived. I ordered the part from David Askew and as you can see it's brand new from the factory, still in the original packaging.

I got the part fitted yesterday. As you'd expect, it didn't line up perfectly with the attachment points on the exhaust, but it's good enough!


I had to order two parts, both of which are different to the original ones from the MY92 variant of the Ghibli. The triangular part that attaches to the gearbox is not offset like the old one was and the long part is about 3-4 cm longer than the original part.

So, that's the fitting of the new exhaust finished. After driving around with it for a bit now, it's not massively louder than the original system, but there's certainly a sweet spot... around 3000 rpm it sounds like a proper Italian engine!