So here's the story. My wife and I have a house on Cape Cod and 3 Cocker Spaniels. One of our favorite things to do is to go down to the beach at low tide and let the dogs loose. They spend hours chasing seagulls and nosing around folks parked on the flats in their 4x4 and Land Rovers etc. We typically get to the beach by parking in a lot and walking in. It's a bit of a hike and for various reasons the walk is getting more difficult, so this year my wife asked for a beach car for her birthday.
I picked up a 2006 XC70 on eBay for peanuts and did a complete stage 0 tune, it runs great and checks out fine with VIDA. I'm now starting to look at tires. I bought a set of IPD Pegasus 17" with the intention of putting 235/45s on them with all the proper steering stops etc, and thought that would be fine for a beach tire. Well, it turns out that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have some regulations that I probably should have looked into before starting on this path, specifically the minimum size they'll let on the beach with a 17" wheel is a 245/60. (http://www.nps.gov/caco/cape-cod-nat...ch-driving.htm) Boring!
I've been knocking around the web looking for lift solutions and naturally found the IPD AT Concept and Bad Swede. I've had some good conversations with Rod at Bad Swede (http://www.badswede.com/), great guy, and it seems like just lifting the car won't solve the problem as the higher the car goes, the further forward the rear trailing arms move, making larger diameter tires rub against the from to the wheel wells--now it's clear why the IPD Team had to do so much cutting around the wheel wells on the AT Concept.
At any rate, I was wondering if any of you have any ideas. There don't seem to be too many XC70 hot rods around the web and I've got to believe that someone has run up against this problem before. Any thoughts or advice other than "Toss the XC70 and get an XC90 or Land Rover" would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
pete.;1
2011 S60 T6
2007 V70 2.5T
2006 XC70
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