franjae wrote:Some years ago, I had new wheels and tyres installed by John at Wheels World on a Merc 190E 2.6. The car vibrated at freeway speed and took John a long time to work it out. In the end he dismissed the wheels and the Pirellis were the culprit, for not being totally round! It was extremely time consuming as each tyre had to be moved around on the wheel to the best position. It would have been cheaper to ditch the Pirellis for something else.
Not sure if this is the same fault as yours. If you can try out another brand of tyres, do so and see if it makes any difference.
I wish I could exhaust tyres as a possible cause, but that would mean forking out $500 for something like adrenalin's. Then if it turned out to not be tyres, i'd have a second set of tyres and wasted $2k on wheels/tyres, with nothing to show for other than aesthetics and plenty of tread.
I went for a drive with Tim Slako from west racing motor developments the other day. He's in osborne park, so we went around to see John as well. John was pretty adamant it wasn't the tyres; that they'd been near perfectly balanced on the wheels, and that he'd noticed some lateral movement on that corner. Tyre related vibrations also tend to get worse the faster you go, hence the 65mph shimmy (fwy driving speeds), but this issue very clearly kicks in at 55/56kph.
I'm taking it in to west racing tomorrow. They're basically going to work from the wheels back, removing and checking components as though to ensure roundness, balance, or absence of any form of damage/abnormality. I just hope if they do find something, it doesn't mean spending another grand. *sigh*
