Crosswinds

How do you find your Panda manages gusty weather? I was coming across the M62 today on the Pennines and it got a bit lively
I know it is a bit flat sided and hardly low slung but wondered what others thought.
My main gripe is the standard tyres, they feel really marginal in wet weather and break away really easily on wet bends. I am going to swap them for 165 14's as on the Sporting.

I found the same on the original tyres. It tended to suffer alot of understeer & break away very easily when full of passengers in wet and damp conditions. Not so bad when it was just me in the car though

My setup now is 195/55 R14 Toyo T1Rs on 14 x 6 alloys - 5mm spacers front and rear and it is MUCH better handling, and the braking is much better too.

Be aware that you can buy wider alloys wheels and tyres for the same cost, if not cheaper than the Fiat standard prices for the sporting alloys.
My advice would be, if your looking at adding alloy wheels, to go as wide as possible. I saw a picture on here of a red sporting wearing 15 inch OZ Super Tourismo's and it looked fantastic

Anyhow drive safe and have fun

Have you got spacers on for purely cosmetic reasons, would the wider alloy wheels rub without them on?

I did try the wheels without the spacers, and the back wheels caused me concern as you could clearly hear a knocking sound. Fronts seemed fine.

I suspect that the knocking sound I heard was due to the locking wheel bolts being slightly longer than the others. I think if you had this problem, you could grind down the bolts a bit so they are slightly shorter

Luckily I had the spacers left over from when I had the same alloy wheels on my Cinquecento, which needed the spacers.

And I suppose it does look okay, I'll upload a front view picture to the gallery in a mo.

EDIT:
http://www.fiatforum.com/gallery/dat...pandafront.jpg

Click on the link to view pic.