When you get time please give us a year end review. Also would you do it again or follow another path?
When you get time please give us a year end review. Also would you do it again or follow another path?
In reply to Mustang50 :
Year end review forthcoming. Was a good season. Waiting for final results to be posted.
Would I do it again? For the moment... Absolutely! After sorting things out the car corners better now than before (a wee bit...).
Think of it like a balancing act. You want each end of the car to corner with the same amount of force and fall away at the same moment (preference for "slightly loose not withstanding). If one end always starts to slide first you have to increase gription on that end or reduce it on the other.
In the previous season I had the car balanced to where I like it. Now I had understeer. The back had more grip than the front. So I had to make the front more compliant (reduce sway bar setting and adjust tire pressures) to catch it up to the rear and get the car roughly back to where I like it.
I could have tightened the rear sway bar and had the same balancing effect. But that would have undone some of the increased rear grip created by the axle mods. Counter productive.
Final answer after I tear the axle down again this winter. Hopefully it is not full of metal filings.
Another Concussion
When you love someone you constantly enable them to do the things they love.
Sitting out back with my wife on a warm Monday night I realized why the entire left side of my head was sore and why I had not slept for two days. That quick “tank slapper” on Saturday morning had given me a concussion.
Although it was now two days late the doctor called back quickly with an order for an emergency CAT scan. No bleeding found; take it easy for a few days they said… Someone 1/3 my age suggested I try more sedate hobbies...
While leaving the hospital emergency my wife asked: “What do we have to do so you can keep autocrossing?” That is her “enabling” me. I do the same for her. That’s how we roll.
The first concussion about 10 or so years ago was much worse. I was messed up all summer and could hardly do my job for a week or two. I think I was actually off work for several days. That resulted in roll bar padding above the window and a full harness. It is discussed on Page 1 of this log.
That padding is still there (now covered in Gorilla Tape). It is about ½ inch from my helmet. I bump it about 100 times each run but there is no force involved. It is almost a head rest. The harness has also done its job.
We analyzed the in-car video and logs together.
That Saturday I was still sorting out the rear suspension from the updates last spring. Mistress was loose at the time and this corner was slightly off-camber.
But more importantly, I had just removed several degrees of caster before this event.
My granddaughter had driven the car at the previous event had she had trouble with the force required to steer. Caster has been set to the max for a long time to combat camber gain. I also like how the wheel snaps back to dead straight faster than I could humanly move it. This helps me to “catch” the car by slipping the wheel in my hands when she gets loose.
Watching my hands in the video we could see me slipping the wheel as the back end fell away. My left hand is actually in the air as the rim slides through the fingers on the right.
But with the reduced caster the wheel does not snap back to straight. It overshoots and snaps the car to the right. Then left again before I can close my hand on it.
Data logs indicate Mistress went from 1.2 G to the right to 0.9 G to the left and back to 1.0 G to the right in under 2 seconds.
The roll bar padding did its job but this time my bobble head got a really good wind up into it. My body also moves in the crappy worn out OEM Grandma going to church seat.
My answer to my wife’s question: “I think I need a proper road track seat with head supports.” She asked what it might cost and if I could get one in the car before the next event. At my age this is nothing to mess with.
And that is what the next article will be about. Installing the new seat and how it is to drive the car with it.
When I went from my 1996 to 2001 GT I lost all the space above my helmet it was annoying to drive in auto-X. Hopefully with the new seat installed you will have a lower seat height to help get more room along with the head support on the seat.
Be careful, you only get one head. Also how old is your helmet and is it just a motorcycle helmet?
In reply to DrMikeCSI : Yup - Not a lot of head room in the SN-95 cars. The driver seat was powered so I could lower it enough to fit in the car with a helmet on. But the top of my head is up in the bubble top roof and above the top edge of the window. Hard steel and plastic is only about two inches away from your left side. Form over function / Style over safety.
In reply to Mustang50 :
Hi Mustang 50. My current helmet is an open face RaceQuip Snell certified SA 2020 as per SCCA requirements for Autocross. It is not an expensive brand but it does meet the current requirements. The SA2025 specs that just came out this fall have slightly better concussion protections. But only slightly. When you look at the numbers you realize it would not have made much difference. I will be looking for a new one in the spring anyway.
New Seat Install
Problem Analysis
When working out a fix for a problem I tend to divide solutions into three categories.
The first and lowest is a “Work Around”: A work around does not address the core issue. It circumvents it. The issue is still there it has just been bypassed.
Also, going AROUND something is never the shortest most expedient fix. There is, by definition, a penalty of some sort. I could stop autocross altogether? Autocross slower? Drive a giant 1980 Caprice Classic with lots of head room? I have seen that done. It is kind of fun to watch.
The next level solution is something that will improve (but not solve) the situation directly.
A HANS device would help restrict head movement side to side. But only a little. These are mostly for front movement and would have to be adjusted too tightly to have any effect on this situation. It might help but won’t solve the issue.
Padded neck restraint? Definitely might help keep my head from getting a good wind up into the roof. But would not stop it from hitting. Might help… but not guaranteed to solve.
We are going for SOLVE here!
Road Track Seat with a padded halo around the helmet on each side. Prevents side to side head movement more than an inch or so. Made for this specific issue. Not a work around. Not an improvement. It is a problem SOLVED. Bada Boom!
And – Like the current race harness – It may help me be better in touch with the car thus improving my driving. Perhaps. One could hope. Bonus points?
Like a work around there are still some penalties but they are not associated with avoiding the issue. The seat will be less adjustable than the power OEM seat. Harder for the old guy to climb in and out. You do a lot of in and out in autocross.
But it will be lighter. And as noted above it might/could help me be “one with the car”. There is also a serious cool factor.
I used to be cool. Then I had kids.
The Seat
I purchased a Kirkey Series 81 Aluminum Road Race Seat directly from Kirkey in Canada. I also purchased the mounting brackets for it. The seat comes in sizes 14” through 18.5” wide at the hips. I got the 18.5 inch unit and it fits me perfectly thank you.
In addition, I purchased some seat sliders from Amazon:
I am glad I got these. I would not be able to get in or out without pushing all the way back first.
Installation
First order of business was to download the dimensions from Kirkey and make sure the thing would fit in the car. It is much wider and taller than the OEM seat and an SN95 Mustang is not exactly spacious inside. Kirkey will not attempt to answer if it will fit (wise). But they do have a good and complete dimension sheet.
As part of this exercise, I tried to get a good starting point on where the seat should be placed. This entailed putting the seat where I like it, sitting on a piece of re-bar (sidewise thank you) and marking the position and elevation of the bar. This way I could get the actual position of my tailbone while sitting in the padded seat. The Kirkey only has about ½” of padding.
This worked and got it close. I did have to make an iteration and lower the front supports after the first installation.
By the way. The driver side of an SN95 Mustang is about 2 inches wider than the passenger side. This seat would not fit in the passenger side although one of the narrower versions might make it.
The OEM seat fought back when I tried to remove it. It had never been out of the car. The front studs came out easily. The heads twisted off the rear bolts. I had forgotten they were replaced with stainless bolts when the frame rails were installed.
The frame rail nuts below were acting like lock nuts. Luckily I was able to remove them from below by tack welding the nut to what was now a headless stud and hitting them with the impact.
I replaced these bolts from below to hold the frame rail to the car thus creating studs through the floor to hold the new seat down. Much better.
Weight Savings
The power operated OEM Seat weighed in at a whopping 55 pounds (egad!)
The new seat with its aluminum brackets weighed in at a paltry 26.5 pounds. After building the support brackets (7.2 pounds) and adding the sliders (5.3 pounds) the new assembly came to 39 pounds. A 16 pound savings.
My brackets are heavier than they could be. There are manufactured brackets you can buy that look like they weigh about 3 or 4 pounds. Frankly they look a little wimpy.
The sliders are optional if you are young and spry. I need them though. I will take the 16 pounds and be happy with it.
Seat Set Up Adjustment
The back angle of the Kirkey is fixed at a comfortable 20 degrees. It has several holes to mount the back to the base at different elevations to fit the driver. This is not adjustable after assembly without drilling new holes. It is important to get the shoulder and head support in the correct position. You can’t do this yourself.
I placed some bubble wrap on a dining room chair to protect it and placed the base of the Kirkey on it. Then held the back of the Kirkey where it felt right whiling leaning back in the chair. My wife checked the position and then marked the Kirkey where it should go. Now we knew which holes to use to fit me.
Seat Brackets
The floor of the car is not flat. The front brackets are higher and at a different angle than the rear. In addition, the seat is on a different angle. Even though I knew roughly where I wanted it in space trying to get all these skew angles to line up is a challenge.
So I cheated and made the brackets as hinges which would be welded together later.
Slider Frame
The seat sliders needed to be adapted to the aluminum seat brackets from Kirkey. This entailed a couple of ½” square steel tubes welded to some strip steel. This frame would tie the whole assembly together above and below.
You can’t make a tight bolted connection through a hollow tube (square or round). The bolt will just collapse the tube. So, I placed spacers inside the tube and tacked them in place so that the aluminum Kirkey bracket could be bolted through them.
The black tape above is just to protect the aluminum from weld splatter.
Seat Alignment
I needed to place the center of the seat in alignment with the steering wheels. There is not much inside the car that is trustworthy to use as a reference. The OEM seat mounting holes are not aligned with the center of the OEM seat. Is the steering wheel aligned with the rocker panels? There are no straight lines in this thing!
I finally got a bead on things by using the laser level mounted on the rear deck aimed at the center of the steering wheel and aligned parallel with the rocker panels.
You can see the unwelded slider/bracket assembly on the floor in the photo above. After marking it was welded with the right offset to center the seat on the wheel.
It was difficult to move the seat forward against the incline. A 10# spring from the hardware solved that issue. Here it is shown under the seat. Note in the upper right corner you can see the tab for bolting the center fifth attachment point for the harness.
Finally bolted into the car. As noted above I had to rework the front brackets and lower the front of the seat about an inch. After the first two events I want to add some cross bracing at the lower rear brackets. It moves a bit side to side.
Analysis
First time I drove the car in a T&T event was at Oscoda about a week after this install. The old concrete pavement at that site is fairly coarse. Rough in spots.
It was one of those “Oh hell what have I done to the car?” moments. I thought something was broken. Got out after the first run to check if something underneath had not broken.
You feel everything. You run over a bug and you are going to know. Your butt gauge is set to maximum sensitivity.
That said, the seat is actually pretty comfortable. I can sit in it for long periods of time. And yes, the finely tuned posterior gets you even closer to being “one with the car” (feel the car, get in touch with your car…. ).
But the mission was to make it safer for the old guy driving it. Win! It would be very difficult to get a concussion while cornering in this seat. Even in an actual crash. Head is supported on three sides. Visibility unaffected.
I actually added 3/8” spacers to the halo mount (top part of the seat). This moved it slightly forward which placed it closer to the rear and sides of my helmet. No head bobbles allowed.
This works as intended for safety. And it helps improve driving by giving more detailed feedback of what the tires are doing down there. And it looks pretty cool.
Downsides: Much harder to get in and out. This winter, after I teach myself to TIG, I plan to lower the front left bolster next to my leg about an inch. That will help immensely.
One More Seat Thing
I quickly found that the harness belt clip that comes up from the seat would get lost down the hole. It is a bit scandalous looking to see me digging around trying to retrieve it (Mommy, what's that man doing in the red car?).
So I attached a small cable to the clip around the front of the seat to the cross bar underneath. Now I can just pull the cable to find the thing. Works fine!
You are amazing! Your problem-solving skills are unbelievable. I compare you to Phil Remington. You have to write a book on this whole build process. I've been watching some Mustang build videos on youtube and most of them can't hold a candle to you.
In reply to Mustang50 :
Thanks Mustang50. But Remington was a pro who did his engineering on the fly in real time. He fabricated parts for use the next day on "one off" custom race cars. I am just a hobbyist who takes months to do each iteration on the car.
And I have the internet as an information source. It presents me with several decades of accumulated information by thousands of people. And a very robust after market parts supply. And spreadsheets.
Remington had none of that support system. No, I disagree. Phil Remington was a/the principal design mechanic for Carroll Shelby in the early days. He helped Ford win at Le Mans. I am just trying to get in the top 10 at a local autocross club and have fun doing it. And I like to tell stories.
This winter I am experimenting with using AI (Grok 4) to redesign the front suspension on Mistress. We will see how that goes (if it goes).
Now there is a design tool Remington would never have dreamed of. Imagine what a guy like that would do with a tool like that.
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