How is backspacing measured

Both of these mean different things and have a different impact on your car and how it drives. A negative offset is when you mount your wheel closer to the mounting hub toward the inside of your vehicle. Wide wheels and tires often require a negative offset to make more space for everything. By comparison, a positive offset is when the wheel is mounted further away from the centerline toward the street.

Unlike your wheel offset, backspacing is a bit more self-explanatory. Measuring your backspacing is similar to your wheel offset with some key differences. Here is how you can measure it on your vehicle. Be sure that whatever new wheels or tires you buy will work with your vehicle. Now that you know more about wheel offset and backspacing, you should be able to make a more informed decision on your next set of tires.

However, you may not want to deal with taking these measurements yourself. With such exact measurements, even being off by a few millimeters can have a profound impact on your vehicle.

The TIA-certified tire experts at Tread Connection have the knowledge and skills to provide the accurate tire services you need. We seem to encounter offset more often when we're looking at wheels for late-model cars. This one's a little trickier to measure, but it's easy to understand. Typically expressed in millimeters, offset refers to the distance between the wheel's mounting hub and the center line of the wheel.

The diagram below will make more sense of this. As you can see, this distance can be either negative or positive. High positive offset wheels are typically found on front-wheel-drive cars and modern rear-wheel-drive performance cars such as Corvettes, Camaros, and Mustangs. Negative offsets yield "deep-dish" wheels commonly found on some of our favorite older cars.

So, if a wheel has an offset of 50mm, that means that the face where the wheel will bolt to the hub is 50 millimeters to the outer, curb side from the wheel's centerline. Conversely, an offset of mm is the opposite, 50 millimeters to the inside of the centerline, yielding a deeper "dish" in the wheel. When bolted up to your car this means that a lower offset wheel will stick out farther.

Obviously, a negative offset works the same way. A mm wheel replaced with a mm wheel will move 1" outward as well. Also worth noting are bolt circle and center bore. Bolt circle refers to the diameter of a circle drawn through the center of the wheel studs.

On a four or six-lug car, this is easy to measure, simply go center to center on the holes or studs. Five lug wheels and hubs are more common to the cars that we love, and the odd number can make them a bit tricky to measure. To quickly measure on the wheel, center the measuring tape or ruler on one hole, skip a hole, then measure to the outside of the next hole.

This is the best way to measure bolt circle without a template. Measure from the outside of one stud to the center of the stud across from it. There are also plenty of bolt circle templates available, such as our part These make it easy to measure bolt circle quickly and accurately.

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