The automobile enthusiast magazines are not your friends. In fact, these magazines will publish deceptive or even flat out wrong information deliberately. And gullible readers will spend their money and waste their time making "improvements" to their car's performance that may not be needed or that actually reduce performance. Is every car magazines evil? Heck no, but a discriminating reader needs to be skeptical of claims and that same reader should know that there may be cheaper alternative ways of achieving the same performance.
The magazine business is interesting. Every magazine has a lifestyle personality and a target demographic. By carefully styling the contents, a magazine tries to attract that lifestyle demographic as readers or more importantly they are trying to attract people who aspire to that lifestyle. For example Yachting probably sells as many issues to people who wish they could afford a yacht as they sell to actual yacht owners.
With the exception of club newsletters that are home printed, bound with a stapler and distributed by hand, auto enthusiast magazines are businesses designed to make money. The cover price of a magazine is a small drop in the bucket in terms of magazine revenues; the cover price just about covers the cost of distributing the magazines to newsstand and home delivery.
The real money in the magazine business is selling advertising. Manufacturers make money by selling their products and they advertise in car magazines to help sell those products. It is quickly apparent that the cozy relationship between the magazines and their advertisers exist. The magazines are happy to feature manufacturers products on their pages and the advertisers are happy to buy paid advertising in the same issue that has feature stories about their products.
Reading the typical car magazine, the casual reader could easily be convinced that larger wheels and tires are the key to better performance. The concept of "Plus One" and "Plus Two" wheel and tire sizing (adding a set of wheels that is one or two inches larger than stock diameter and adding tires that are a correspondingly smaller in profile to create a wheel and tire combination that ahs the same outside diameter as the stock wheels and tires) is often featured in the enthusiast magazines. But what the magazine will not tell you is that larger, heavier wheels will reduce your acceleration and create more unsprung weight. Combined with changing the moment of inertia (Moving the weight of the wheels outward with large diameter wheels creates more inertia to overcome) and those flashy new wheels have made your car slower.
So read and enjoy the car enthusiast magazines, but keep a skeptical attitude when they tell you what parts and services you "need."