Argh! Our Toyota Land Cruiser's lovely new Dakar-spec wheels don't fit

Renowned photographer Mark has been working with Top Gear for many, many years. When not taking photos he’s buying inappropriate cars. Here he shares his addiction with the world

This was supposed to be a very straightforward Ricci's Garage update on fitting another set of off-road wheels to my Land Cruiser, but as you can see by the images on this page, only a single wheel has been attempted so far. Thankfully, we didn't upload any audio to this page, or the rather colourful language that accompanied it would get us into hot water. 

Annoyingly, all of this frustration could’ve been easily avoided had I decided to read any of the ‘for sale’ advert on eBay. Instead, I decided to employ the immediate excitement approach, glancing over the sizes and hitting buy it now before worrying about any of the boring stuff.

The first red flag should’ve been the fact the images showed them fitted to a Ford Ranger. A very quick Google showed that Rangers have a PCD (the number of wheel bolts and space between them) of 6x139, which is the same as the new 250 Land Cruiser. What I didn’t research was the centre bore size (the hole in the back of the wheel which fits onto the hub), and it turns out Ford Rangers have a much smaller centre bore than Land Cruisers. This was only researched upon fitting the first wheel, and the immediate rage of realising this was likely on par with having Cycling Mikey tap on your window. Especially when it turns out they look properly cool.

What you’re looking at is a set of 18x8.5in Evo Corse Dakar wheels – a design which is unsurprisingly used in many heavy-duty motorsports like rallying and Dakar. They’re even used on the winning Toyota Hilux, albeit with the correct centre bore dimensions I’d assume. What I love about these wheels is they’re brilliantly rugged and give a properly purposeful look to any car, especially when matched with a chunky off-road tyre that’ll sound like a swarm of bees following you as you drive up and down the M1. Evo Corse does make Land Cruiser-fitment wheels – in fact it can produce just about every offset and size imaginable – but my impatience and excitement for a bargain meant I’d gambled on these Ranger wheels instead.

Now one option to get them to fit would be to run adapters which allow a different centre bore size on either end. This would be very quick and easy, if it wasn’t for the fact the offset was already too aggressive and any additional spacing will make the Land Cruiser look like a very odd 1930s hot rod. The other is to machine the centre bores larger, and after a quick chat with Craig Taylor of Dyno Torque – a man who has previously saved my bacon many times while fixing my Pajero Evolution – that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

There shouldn’t be any downsides to this in terms of strength or stiffness as the size increase is only a few millimetres, and if I were sensible, I’d put some more road-friendly tyres on instead. But clearly that’s not going to happen because I’m an idiot, but in a few days’ time we can all pretend this little mishap never happened in the first place. Until the next one.