This car was made to wear eight-spokes.
Race Service WatanabeFacebookWatanabe’s eight-spoke wheels are iconic. Racing Service Watanabe was founded in 1967 and the eight-spoke quickly became Nissan’s racing wheel of choice. “Wats,” as they came to be known, are a common sight on early Nissan Skyline GT-Rs and 240Zs and many other contemporary Japanese cars. Under a set of bolt-on fender flares, they just look right. The new Nissan Z draws heavily on the original 240Z, so naturally, it looks incredible on Wats, too.
Watanabes and similar eight-spoke wheels from Minilite, and later, Panasport, look good on virtually anything. With the new Z, it almost feels like the car was designed specifically to wear these wheels.
RS Watanabe posted these pictures to Facebook on Monday, and we suspect that this won’t be the last time we see a Z on eight-spokes. Unfortunately, it’s tough to tell the exact size here, even with the aid of Google Translate. The pictures are low-resolution, so we can’t read the tire sidewalls either. Worth noting that the Z pictured is a base Sport model, which comes with 18-inch wheels rather than the 19s of the higher-level Performance. These definitely don’t look bigger than 18s, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they’re wider than the stock nine inches.
In any event, the stance is perfect. It won’t be cheap to recreate this look, though. RS Watanabe lists its 18×9-inch wheels at ¥81,000 ($556.51) per piece, and that obviously doesn’t include shipping to the U.S. That said, Falcon-D, a Watanabe distributor, is running a 20-percent-off sale on certain wheels. In any event, can you put a price on perfection? In this case, I’m going to say no.
Chris Perkins Senior Editor Chris Perkins is the Web Editor for Road & Track magazine.
Keyword: The New Nissan Z Looks Too Good on Watanabe Wheels