So Much For That Wheel…

I made the bad decision to run my rare Rial ViperDs on my wagon this winter. I suited up with snow tires and made the best of a bad situation–there are fewer than 100 sets of these wheels in the US and they are no longer made. I love these wheels–I’m very partial to the tuning fork design, and seven is my magic number for spokes. In the past, I’d run the old 15" stockers with Semperit snows to get through the salty season, but a big-brake upgrade last summer meant the 15s were off the option list this time around. After about three weeks of ignoring the reality of the situation, I sat down this weekend and cleaned my wheels. Yes, the wheel in the pic is "clean." You can see where a bend took the clearcoat off the polished lip (had that rolled out right away), and the coating took a major beating. There’s even a chink out of one of my spokes–I have no idea how much that will cost to get fixed. I am facing down an entire remanufacture of these wheels this year–I’ll send them out to a local shop that does everything the manufacturer does down to the anti-corrosion bath. At $100 a pop, it’s not cheap, but I do like these wheels. Now my question for our readers is: do I keep them silver or color match them to my Indigo Blue car? I’m leaning toward the Indigo right now, but I can be swayed back to silver.