WHEELS

At the time of ordering, Bill at Parallel offered 3 different types of wheel. One was a copy of the original Diablo wheel, one was a copy of the later Diablo wheel with the 'squared off' holes, and the other was a copy of the (I think GT spec) model, with a black 5-spoke design. All wheels use a polished split rim design with cap head bolts around the perimeter.

I went for the early type because it looked the most original to me. The later type wheel with the squared off holes was my immediate first choice but upon closer inspection I could see that the centres were machined totally flat and this made them look too far removed from the original. The 5-spoke wheels certainly looked original too, but I simply didn't like them on a Diablo. Everyone is used to seeing multi-holed wheels on Countachs' and Diablos and the 5-spokes just looked too, well, 'aftermarket' to me. Just a personal thing though. In addition, because they were so 'gappy' you could easily see the brakes and obviously the Parallel ones aren't nearly as macho as the originals. At least the multi-holed wheels covered them to some extent. The pics below were ones I found on the Parallel website which I used to help me make my choice with.

Theres not much to choose between all the wheel styles on price. I think the ones I picked were actually the cheapest at £1,280 (no VAT applicable) but I think they are all within a couple of hundred pounds of each other. Parallel can also offer all designs with an 18" fitment for the rear. This looks nicer but when I ordered mine I was told (by Bill) that they were 'considerably' more expensive so I didn't bother asking how much more. More fool me, because I found out (after mine arrived) that it only worked out at about £130 more. Great. If I would've known that then I would have had the 18" rears without question.

The pics below are of my wheels when they finally arrived. Also is a pic of the 17" rear against the 18" rear. Only the rims are different, the centres are the same. The tyre profile is reduced (30 series against 35) so the overall diameter is virtually identical.

Above left: my 17" with 335/35 tyre. Above right: a friends 18" with 335/30 tyre.

One point I would advise you to check is the clearance between the rear wheel inner lip and the chassis upright & wishbone. My chassis arrived with 3mm spacers but there was still scuffage to the alloy rim. Even if the wheels had not made contact with the uprights, I would still have not been happy because with the use of the spacer I found I could only get 4 turns on the wheelnuts.

contact points with upright and wheel

**UPDATE** My wheels were supplied incorrectly. The correct wheels fit without any upright contact and thus do not need a spacer, which also means there are more turns on the wheelnuts.

One last point- the wheels don't come with centre caps which I think is a bit of a swizz considering nearly every other wheel manufacturer does. No real bad thing as you should be fitting genuine Lambo ones anyway, but still...

TYRES

I had quite a bit of trouble trying to get the Pirelli tyres from my usual tyre place in Barking, Essex (Elite Tyres) and who basically gave me the runarond with regards to both pricing and availability information. I thought this odd considering there was a few quid involved for a set of 4 but in the end they did me a favour. After not hearing anything satisfactory from them I decided to give Micheldever Tyres (listed on the 'Links' page) a call who were nothing but extremely efficient. They gave me an immediate price of £655.65 including VAT which was some £50 cheaper than Elites 'special' price! As Micheldever is some 2 hours drive away I asked them if they were able to mail order them, which they could at an additional cost of £14.69 for all 4 tyres. A fantastic price, and with great service to boot. Suffice to say, I'll be using Micheldever for all my tyre purchases now. Even with shipping costs, they work out cheaper than most places!

The only downside was that at the time I needed them Pirelli were having odd stock levels of their 'Assimetrico' and newer spec. 'Rosso' tyres, the Rosso simply being a successor to the Assimetrico. Micheldever only had the rears in stock which were Assimetricos. I had two choices- wait several weeks for the matching fronts to become available, or have the later Rosso fronts which were available immediately and could be sent to me within 3 days. As this would be the only thing holding up delivery of my chassis, I decided to go for this option of the Rosso front/Assimetrico rear. There really is no problem with this, other than the tread patterns look different. Both grip levels and general integrity are extremely similar.

Tyre size is the reccomended 235/40/17 front, with 335/35/17 rear. By the way, until you have seen a 335 section tyre close up, you will be simply blown away by how massive they are! If you consider that the 'skinny' tyre pictured below right is a 235 section, and on most cars would be seen as 'fat' then you can see how awesome the 335's are!

WHEEL ALIGNMENT

This is a specialised job and should only be carried out with the right equipment but I have posted the info Parallel sent me as you may wish to use it to at least get your alignment in the 'ballpark' as I did. When I received my chassis the front wheels were pointing in all sorts of directions like a gecko's eyes so I used this info to at least enable me to push the thing straight. I managed to borrow a camber gauge from my work and built a simple 'box' around the car to check toe in/out. It is by no means an accurate setup but it's far better than it was and I will get Parallel to finish it off when it goes there for pre-SVA. 'The Box' is an old method for checking toe and is very simple and inexpensive to do, albeit time consuming. It involes setting up 4 axle stands at the front and rear of the car and putting some aluminium angle accross each pair of stands at the front and rear. From each piece of angle, you run some thread down each side of the car. do the same with the other side and then measure the distance from the centre of each wheel to the thread. When this is the same distance on both sides of the car you should obviously have two lines of thread down each side of the car which are exactly parallel to the centreline of the car.

From there, you simply measure the distance from the front and back edge of each wheel to find out the toe. If the measurement is the same, your wheels are 'zero toe'. If you have a greater distance on the front edge than the back edge you would have 'toe out' and vice versa would give you 'toe-in'.

Above: setting up alignment with the 'bar and string' method

Setting up camber and caster is only really possible with dedicated equipment, but at least setting the toe will mean your cars pushes straight and doesn't crawl off down the road like a crab.

For the shocks, Parallel reccomended setting the damping to 1 click off maximum. This is obviously specific to the Gaz shocks they use. Ride height is really up to you, although I have tried setting mine to what I feel looks like the original.

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