I recently met Jonathan Sage (owner of Group4wheels) at Brooklands Auto Italia event. Here's a picture of us together, me holding the wheel.
Jonathan is a great guy and very enthusiastic. I was able to have a good look at his wheels and I have to say they are extremely high quality!
Jonathan is going into production with the 10" rear. This will fill out that rear arch and look fantastic - just like the 1966 prototype!
He also wants to produce a new wheel for the front to go with the 10" rear. This makes sense for anyone running the rough sand cast magnesium wheels because the new rears will be perfect castings so they will not match the rough original front wheels. If you have the later die cast aluminium wheels, these are already perfect so you would only really need the rears.
Jonathan has asked me if there is any reason why he cant produce an 8" wide front wheel? As you know the original front is 7" wide. I spent some time today looking at the front of a Mangusta with the original 7" front wheels - 215/60 tyres. I wound it onto full lock in both directions and can't see and reason why he cant add another 1" on the inside. 215/60 is a little short on the front, maybe with an 8" wheel 225/60 would be better. I noticed the calliper will be slightly inside the wheel (like it should have been originally). Jonathan assures me his wheels have a lot more room inside them than the originals do, so the calliper will not be too close to the inside of the rim. Stones can get stuck between the calliper and the wheel and score the rim. I have experienced this on a GT5 Pantera with it's original wheels and 6 piston Willwoods that had very little clearance inside the wheel.
Adding another 1" to the inside of the front wheel would improve the scrub radius and make a small improvement in the steering. It's not possible to put it on the outside because the original front wheel already has way too much negative offset. The backspacing on the original wheel is 59.5mm, it should be a lot more. This is one of the reasons the Goose doesn't have very good steering, the low geared rack masks this somewhat. Another 1" on the inside would improve the backspacing to 84.5mm.
From what I can see any tyre rubbing issues on the front of a Goose are caused by tyres that are too tall so adding 1" on the inside can only improve things, right? What do you guys think?
Johnny
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