The SVR comes with 21 inch wheels and 275 profile M+S Michelin tyres as standard with an option to upgrade to 22 inch wheels and 295 profile Continental tyres developed specifically for the car. The option costs about £2400 from memory.

In addition, specifying 22" wheels means the car comes with painted multi-section stick-on spats around the wheel arches to provide a few mm of technical wheel arch extension. The cosmetic effect is one you either like or you don't. I don't.

The 295 profile tyres are unique to the SVR. Other models of the RRS with 22 inch wheels retain the 275 profile. The 22 inch SVR wheels use a different hub offset to fit the wheels within the wheel arch.

I originally bought the 21 inch wheels and when I realised that in press-on driving, the car was leaning heavily on the shoulders of the tyres, that was the cue to try a set of 22s. I bought them in April but have only now had the time to fit them.

Off the car, they are hugely unwieldy and unfortunately one toppled over and damaged the mirror finish. The wheels are mostly polished alloy with painted spokes and I expect a clear lacquer to protect them from the elements. Three alloy wheel restorers wouldn't touch it, so I bought a replacement and the relatively minor damage may seem irrelevant if I have a mishap with one in the future so I have kept it "for stock".

The rims are £900 each including VAT before discount, seems a lot but not when one is sitting on your kitchen table. There's a lot of metal and each rim and tyre weighs a substantial 37kg. Add the tyre, TPMS transmitter and Centre Cap, and the cost at list is well over £1250 a corner. Sounds a lot but replacement rims alone for my Ferrari are over £2500 each. The rims are made in Taiwan which makes you wonder about the logistical issues of supplying 4 wheels to a line in Solihull every 96 seconds.

Changing the wheels over is not for the faint-hearted. The first problem is jacking the car up high enough so the the wheel lifts off the ground. There doesn't seem to be any way to prevent the wheel sinking as you raise the body. Rumours that this is stopped by opening a door or putting the hazards on are not correct. Neither of my trolley jacks would go high enough so they were joined by one which will raise 2 tonnes through 820mm, though not without modifying the saddle to ensure it makes contact with the jacking point only and not the surrounding sill cover.

It goes without saying the car should be in park, the handbrake on and the wheels staying on the ground chocked. I tried using the jack which comes with the emergency spare wheel and, quite honestly, it is not fit for purpose. So while I was quite happy to change a wheel by myself at the roadside in my Evoque, I can't imagine doing so in even the most favorable conditions with the SVR. There's too much risk of the jack toppling or distorting.

The wheel nuts are easily undone with a breaker bar - never a torque wrench - and the next issue is simply manhandling the wheel as it comes off and positioning the replacement without damaging the wheels or the car. I have a tyre lift trolley which supports the wheel as it comes off and can be wheeled away. Procedure in reverse is to put the wheel on the trolley, move the trolley into position, lift and rotate the wheel into position and move onto the studs. Wheel nuts on, initial tightening to mate the wheel and hub, then lower onto the deck and tighten using a torque wrench to 133 Nm.

So it's all quite a to-do, took the best part of an afternoon, though the priority was not to damage anything, a learning curve and I think you'd allow a couple of hours next time.

So, how do they compare? I was careful to take the car out on a favourite road before the change so the experience was fresh in my mind and I was quite surprised how stark the differences are. First, the 22 inch wheels look so much better filling those wheel arches. Second, the handling is much improved, the turn-in much sharper and there is much less an impression of the car leaning on the sidewalls. It feels quite a lot more stable under cornering, more go-kart like. Lastly, and this a negative, there is a significant increase in road noise from the tyres compared to the 21s and the ride quality has suffered. It will be interesting to see how it is on those particularly nasty sections of concrete motorway such as the southern section of the M25.

Conclusions. Should you go for 21s or 22s? Leaving aside cosmetics which are down to personal taste, if you are coming from a traditional Range Rover experience, the 21s will give you more of what you are used to and are a well judged balance between performance and comfort. If you are looking instead for the purest SVR experience, it's the 22s especially with that custom developed rubber.

I fully expect to go back to the 21s for the winter, partly because of the M+S tyre, partly because the corrosive effect of winter salt, partly for the slightly greater protection when going off-road. Plus, of course, I have to justify having these huge tyres taking up the space.

Incidentally, there were no issues with the TPMS. The car quickly acquired the pressures from the new wheels. Mark

SVR in Estoril Blue

Thank you for that Mark.

I'm considering buying a set of 21s for the winter. Knowing me, though, I won't remember to change them over until I'm stuck snow. 

Mark the logistics of shipping 20 or so 40ft contianer loads of alloy wheels from Taiwan to the UK is nothing. There are just about daily sailings between Koashiung and Europe and the cost per container for freight is seriously depressed at the moment so ballpark would be around $700 to $1000 a unit................ plus customs fees on landing in the UK. Peanuts really when you think of the cost of the ship, the cost of the container and the cost of everything else to get a container from Asia to Europe. It probably costs more to get them from Felixstowe or Southampton to Solihull than it does to get them from Taiwan to a UK port, crazy but such is life!

I have the optional 22" wheels on my HSE and was pleasantlyu surprised at how good the ride is on them, even in Dynamic mode on the TR, they are no noisier than the 20" wheels that I had on both my Evoques. 2020 Pangea Green 1st Edition D240 New Defender 110 is here and loving it
2018 Melting Silver Mini Countryman PHEV - soon to be replaced
2015MY Corris Grey SDv6 HSE Dynamic, the best car I have ever owned, totally reliable only a cou0le of rattles in 3 years, now no longer in my care
Also in my garage is a 1996 TDi300 Defender 90 County HT made into a fake CSW

Tim, you are of course vastly more experienced than me in this area - most of my international "logistics" is limited to shipping a dozen or so cases of wine from Tuscany and there's never a chance of my wine cellar running dry. However, ball park, that's a 40ft container load of wheels a day for Solihull production and you don't need a very big SNAFU for production to grind to a halt, not just wheels but all the thousands of other components as well. The whole just-in-time ethos relies on minimal buffer stocks but there is a trade-off between cost and continuity of production. Rather them than me!

How long does it take a ship to get from Taiwan to Felixstowe? Mark

SVR in Estoril Blue

These days of super slow steaming it takes about 25 days Mark. We used to carry hundreds of containers every sailing for Toyoya and Honda when I was on the Japanese service ships, we had a timeframe to be berthed in Southampton and get them discharged so they could be on the train or trucks to the factory - if there were to be any delays on passage after leaving Suez then we always got speeded up crossing the Med to get miles in hand. The cost of the extra fuel burned was way less than the compensation to be paid to Honda or Toyota if we missed the tide at Southampton! Even the terminal was locked into the agreement and they had to ensure that they had the units off the ship and through the container park/ Customs clearance and on the road to Swindon within something like 3 hours of them being discharged from the ship. Just in time delivery still happens - even on my current ship. We carry hundreds of container loads of bananas from Costa Rica and Belize to Tilbury - although they are shipped by one of the big name producers frequently they are discharged and ready for the Monday morning banana auctions in London, miss the tide for Tilbury and the bananas miss the auctions, big money at stake! 2020 Pangea Green 1st Edition D240 New Defender 110 is here and loving it
2018 Melting Silver Mini Countryman PHEV - soon to be replaced
2015MY Corris Grey SDv6 HSE Dynamic, the best car I have ever owned, totally reliable only a cou0le of rattles in 3 years, now no longer in my care
Also in my garage is a 1996 TDi300 Defender 90 County HT made into a fake CSW

This is the reason why LJR use a third party as their logistics company, and why orders need to be confirmed and are immovable one month before build. If the line has to be stopped the supplier gets charged per minute (+ extra). With a car emerging once every 1.5 minutes, you can imagine what the cost is. 

When JLR redeveloped Halewood they encouraged their suppliers to build factories around the car plant - less likelihood of delays on the motorways if the parts only have to get there from around the other side of the plant. I know that the seat makers and dashboard makers are onsite there. It used to be at Solihull that the employees sports ground had to double up as helipads for when there was a smash on the motorways around Brum, to keep the factory moving suppliers helicoptered in parts so the line didn't stop! Having said that, it is amazing where some of the smaller components travel from to become part of the car - wiper blades come from Mexico or Italy frequently, on my Evoque (and probably Mark's one as well) there were lots of parts stamped Volvo, Made in China! The more frequently you guys buy new Land Rover, Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Jaguar cars the longer I have a job driving the ships that bring the parts in from overseas! Only another two years to go and then I don't have to worry about getting wiper blades or washer water pumps or Bananas or Pineapples back to the UK "Just in Time" 2020 Pangea Green 1st Edition D240 New Defender 110 is here and loving it
2018 Melting Silver Mini Countryman PHEV - soon to be replaced
2015MY Corris Grey SDv6 HSE Dynamic, the best car I have ever owned, totally reliable only a cou0le of rattles in 3 years, now no longer in my care
Also in my garage is a 1996 TDi300 Defender 90 County HT made into a fake CSW

Hi
sorry to jump the thread but have a question, picking up on the comment that the 295 tyre requires a different hub offset, would this apply to a 305 tyre on the std 22" rim fitted to a 4.4 AB?

Standard 22s are still 275. The SVRs 22s are wider, being 295, hence requiring the increased offset and spats. 

Standard 22" rims are 9.5J whereas the SVR rims are 10J with a different offset

I doubt you'll clear the knuckle if you go to 305s on a 9.5J, more importantly that's outside of ETRTO recommendations so you could end up with stability issues too.

Just for info, what aspect ratio are you looking at?