Relief cuts on wheel wells?

I'm in the process of making interior changes to the Satellite, and am wondering why the previous owner would have made these cuts to the wheel wells, and all I can figure is it was to make a little more room for the rear tires (295/40/ZR20 Nittos). Has anyone else encountered this sort of thing before?? I do believe with the correct backspacing, you can fit even larger meats in the rear without any sort of modifications, am I right?? Thanks in advance...

Well, I doubt he cut it for the thrill of it! Did you look up in the wheel well and see what kind of tire clearance there is?
Remember, the tire sidewall will flex and there is also a little movement in the springs and also the body roll. You can get by with minimal tire to spring clearance, but you need some room from tire to wheel well or it will scrub.

I could not find the specs for Nitto in that size, but a similar Michellin has 11.9 inch section width, 10.2 inch tread, and is 29.3 inches tall. That is a big tire to tuck up in a stock wheel well even on the 71 B-body. Your common 275-60-15 BFG which so many people run has an 11 inch section, 9 inch tread, but is only 28 inches tall.

The clearance is very tight for sure. I have a 4-link in the rear, which might be as much the reason for the cut as the tire size I suppose. I'm still curious if this is a common practice, or if anyone else has seen or done it before.

He opened it up for a reason. You can see the hammer mark's where he beet the heck out of it. I don't know but on 69 runners the spring hanger get's in the way also. Thought of Mini tubing mine when building it but a lot of work to do that so decided not to. LOL. Back in the day you could see a lot of thing's people did to increase the wheel tub area. Even what you have their. So hope this gives you an Idea of what was going on. Don't know if it helped or not.

Thanks. I doubt there was any consideration for Spring Hangers since it was converted to a 4-link. However, there could still be Suspension related reasons, as well as the tire size. I've just never seen this done before and was curious if others had seen the exact thing before...