Porsche Enthusiasts Club Forum

So who can tell me all about wheels then ? My 1984 944 is currently running cookie cutters with 215x60R15 tyres all round. Now I've seen reference to cars running 6J at the front and 7J at the back ... what size tyres would they be ? And what's all this about "early offset" ?

They should be 7" all around. No Porsche 944 ever came with narrower wheels. The 924S had 6" Telephone Dial wheels and the 924S Le Mans had 6" and 7" Telephone Dials, but any 944 with 6" fronts has the wrong wheels fitted, or the wrong size.

Its common to see 6" & 8" Design 90s fitted to 944s. This is because the 964 sourced wheels were far more common used in the nineties as people replaced them on their 911s, with newer Cup wheels.

That's great, thanks for clearing that up. What about "early offset" - what's that all about ?

All series one 944s and 1986 model year series two 944s used a 23mm offset wheel. 1987 model year onwards cars used a 52mm offset wheel. Essentially the wheel hubs on the '87> cars moved out by about 30mm per side. One of the reasons for this was to accommodate ABS sensors (whether the car had them fitted or not) and the result was that the wheels went from having a visible inch or two of rim, to showing very little rim because it was no all inboard of the wheel's face.

The wheels aren't interchangeable: ET23 wheels on an '87> car will rub the wheelarches and ET52 wheels fitted to an <'86 will look comically skinny. The latter can be corrected using wheel spacers, but the former cannot be altered.

Thanks again - that's clear now. One last (?) question - what ET23 wheel styles other than the Cookie Cutters were/are available ?

1986 model year series two 944s used ET23 Telephone Dials. Much prettier than the 1987-1989 ET52 replacements, and 15" and 16" Fuchs wheels were available as a costly option.

The price of Fuchs wheels is now around 5x what it used to be, so they aren't the easy option that they once were. Their rears will probably have been ET11 and Fuchs copies usually replicate this in 7" & 8" copies (ET23 & ET11).

Simon