Ask The Editors: Why Don’t We Balance Our Wheels?

Where are the wheel weights?

That’s a good question but the answer will surely make immediate sense. The reason we balance our wheels is to ensure even distribution of the rotational mass of the wheel and tire assembly. The goal is to prevent vibration and to smooth out the driving experience. On pavement, this makes a lot of sense. You would know in a hurry if one or more of the wheels on your car was suddenly stuttering at highway speed. On dirt, however, all of this changes. Unless you were riding on nothing but graded, smooth hardpack, you wouldn’t notice such vibration anyway. Now factor in the cambers, the variety and rapid change of conditions, and the constant pounding an ATV (especially one in a race environment) endures and it quickly becomes apparent that such concerns are null and void.

That brings us to the second reason – weight. How we balance out the weight of the tire and wheel is by using small weights to serve as counter-balancers against wobble. The instant that wheel/ tire collect a few ounces of mud or dirt, any balance measures done with weights would be undone. In the course of a single lap of a GNCC event, the correct balance point of a wheel likely changes multiple hundreds of times as tire treads pick up and fling away mud.

About the only form of ATV racing you might see the benefits of balanced wheels would be supermoto or TT/ flattrack, where the racing surface is much more consistent.

Got questions for us? Ask them here!