Here's my stance on wheel spacers . . .

[wrench459]

The ring and pinion will be the least of your worries with the T/P down low.
You shock the rearend and the spiders and side gears will be long gone even with fairly low H/P motors.

[RallyBob]

FWIW, I've run wheel spacers on street cars for many years with no issues.

As well, when I used to help my friend Dave with his circle track car ('75 Ascona), we ran 8" wide wheels (9" outside width) with a 3.5" backspace (so that's 5.5" of wheel outside the hub face).

On a 31 degree banked track with 235/60-13 McCreary racing tires, we would have to repack the right front hub every 2-3 races, otherwise by the 5th event the bearing races would seize and spin inside the hub! We never cooked any rear axle bearings, but did bend a few rear axle flanges from wheel-to-wheel contact. Like Mark, we cracked more than our fair share of wheel centers, even the racing (double-thickness) wheels with 45 degree lug nuts. Once we integrated our right front wheel bearing service intervals into the maintenance, the car was dead reliable.

Anyway, running street tires on a flat surface will never put loads into the hubs like we saw, so as long as you check the wheel bearing adjustments once in a while and check the lugnut torque, you should be fine.

[Aardvaark]

Bob brought up a point I glossed over. While I raced, I serviced the Ascona's front wheel bearings about every four races and never had a failure on the track or street. Iirc, it still had it's original wheel bearings all around after 2.5 years of racing. Also change the pumpkins oil every now and then as well as the tranny oil.
However, I don't believed we abused the rear ends as bad as the drifting guys do since we tried to be smooth and only really broke something
when we got off the track and over bumps and in my case at Blackhawk Farms, over several small trees and brush.
So as Wrench and Bob have said, you can break stuff if you get carried away, even with a stock engine. The aren't a 9" nodular Ford, but aren't
real delicate either.

[Redskinsjbs]

As long as it is safe enough that I would be able to, hypethetically, get OUT of the right lane, accelerate past grandma and get back INTO the right lane I am going to get the higher offset wheels with the spacers and call it a success. Discount tire is having free shipping until the end of the month! so I will sit on this until the 30th and then either order the wheels or wait for a more suitable solution.

The way I see it, if you Gurus are all saying that essentially no matter how hard I drive under normal circumstances other parts in the car will break before the wheel studs, this seems like a feasible option. And I won't drift the car, even if it is rear wheel drive with the kind of weight distribution for a drift car that I like .

Thanks for your help everyone!

[oldopelguy]

Just to clarify, there are two main types of spacers out there: The first are the ones that you just pop in between the wheel and the mounting flange, over the existing studs, then bolt the wheel on now spaced out a bit. The other type bolts to the flange and then the wheel bolts to new studs on it.

The first type is not recommended by anyone, and it is the type that puts additional stresses on your studs. It is also the type that was often used back in the 60s and 70s with disastrous results.

The second type shouldn't stress the studs any more than the original wheel did. With the second type you are essentially just making the wheel have less offset. Imagine it first bolted to the inside of the wheel with it's studs: all you have is a solid wheel/spacer assembly with less offset than the wheel alone. As long as the resulting combination of wheel/spacer has roughly the same offset as the original wheel, then you shouldn't have any issues with wheel bearings and such since you're just replicating what was there.

In general, using a 1" spacer (25mm) on a "normal" FWD wheel with 40mm of offset yields a (40-25) 15mm offset, which is pretty close to what you started out with on a GT. Offset being a measure of the center of the wheel with respect to the mounting flange, that means the center of the tire should be in roughly the same position under the car. You will probably be using a wider wheel, though, so the extra width will be spread out on the inside and outside of where the original tire was, which may cause clearance issues if taken too far.