Thanks Dave – Very clean installation and well thought out for driver room and safety. Driver comfort makes a huge difference in endurance racing as you well know.
Looks like you moved the seat back about 10” + too.
Thanks! I actually did the design concept by mounting the seat where I wanted it relative to the pedals, shifter, and steering column
axis, then did the spec from there.
The seat actually ISN'T set back, but in the pix, it looks that way. The seat is on sliders (Sparco double-locking), which are mounted on an inclined mount. I've got it set up so that at the full-rear position on the sliders, the seat is as low and rearward as possible, just barely contacting the gusset tube with the halo. This design was done for two different reasons: 1) Allow drivers of radically different physical size to get comfortable in the car and 2) to maximize egress room and speed (for safety and during driver changes). With the seat in the "normal" driving position for me, the door bars are angled down from 1" above my hip height, to even with the top of my knees, and with a minimum of 6" of crush space between the bars themselves and the seat. The FIA bar acts as additional intrusion protection, plus offers a great grab-point when doing egress. With the seat fully to the rear, there is a HUGE amount of room to get your torso out of the cage and pull your legs out after. My personal record from "as raced" to out of the car is a touch under four seconds... That includes belts, nets, seat position, master switch, opening the door and bailing out, albeit not gracefully. I didn't practice with the radio and cool-suit connected because the "emergency" drill treats them as sacrificial... Too expensive to practice with, but they'll come apart (permanently!) when diving out. There is enough slack on both to allow the driver to stand outside the car about a foot or two away while still being connected...
In a pit stop with driver change: As the driver is coming down pit road, he does NOT (ahem, yeah right!) loosen the lap and shoulder harnesses slightly. He pulls into pit lane, pops the harness latch, reaches down, and pulls the seat release lever. The seat (due to the incline) slides back and down, while the next driver is opening the door. dropping the window net, and disconnecting radio and cool-suit lines. The drivers swap places. The new driver hops in and buckles up (but does not tighten!) while the old driver does the cool-suit and radio stuff. Meanwhile the crew chief is in on the passenger side helping get the buckles in, changing out the water jug, etc. Once the new driver is buckled, he pulls on the wheel and slide the seat forward to his desired position, then the old driver and crew chief yank on the harnesses to tighten. Crew chief bails out, old driver puts up the window net and closes the door. The above takes a LOT less time (with a little bit of practice) than it takes to dump 5 gallons of fuel, never mind 10 or 14... While the rest of the fuel is going in, the old driver briefs the new driver on track conditions, traffic notes, and car behavior notes ("gets a little 'oversteery' on exit once you get past a half-tank; watch out for the purple Miata if you catch him in a corner, he tends to drift in like you're not there; apex at 7 is slick, somebody dripped something there so take it just a touch wide"), and by the time the fuel is in, you have a driver that's safely belted into the car, fully briefed, focused and 100% ready to go.
So, no set-back, but if you have a co-driver that is 6'9" tall, he'll fit!
That 50 to 100 LBs of extra material that you don’t want to bother with – If you have the time and it doesn’t hurt the visual appeal to you, I would pull it and add it back where it’s needed.
I think you would be very surprised at what 75 + LBs does when well placed into a already balanced car.
It's not that I don't want to bother with, honestly, it's that I don't want to bother with it
yet. As soon as funds permit, I'm dropping a 22 gallon cell in the car along with trans and diff coolers, and that will seriously impact the overall F/R balance and net weight. Once I do the cell and bump the power up to the final number (335-345RWHP: Hoping cams alone will get there) to get right up against the ratio, THEN I'll start dialing into that last 50-100lbs. It'll be fairly large and in-depth work, though. K-member swap, detail-type gutting forward of the firewall, wiper motor relocation and deleting the pantagraph arm for a single-wiper setup, ABS controller relocation, battery relocation; a lot of trimming and hole-sawing, in other words. It's pretty amazing how quickly stuff like that adds up, though! As soon as I'm done there, then it's time to get the car baselined, and then add aero. And yes, it's ALWAYS to your advantage to get the car "too light" then add it back in with strategically placed balast and/or accessories. Time to channel Smokey Yunick!
Which fuel pump for whipple supercharged 2005 Mustang GT
