Trackday Diaries: The Agony Of The Seat

If dying is easier than comedy, then surely driving a race car is easier than building one. Which is why I’m thrilled to have outsourced the management of my Neon and Danger Girl’s MX-5 Cup car; I might be able to win a race now and again, but my attempts to handle the vehicles myself amounted to one long and unmitigated disaster. Since 2014, the Plymouth has been in the capable hands of Jon Shevel at Albany Autoworks. He’s directly responsible for said Neon’s transition from a car that hadn’t started since 2009 and couldn’t pass tech to a podium finish in both SCCA and NASA for 2016.

DG’s MX-5 is now with The Boost Brothers. Check them out, watch their YouTube videos, learn all sorts of stuff about fixing crash repair, welding cracked tubes, swapping out hubs, that sort of thing. Bozi and Bojan have been pulling quite a few overnight shifts getting the car ready for the 2017 American Endurance Racing season. Even better, they’ve made pretty much all of the decisions as to what goes on the car and how everything goes together.

The only major choice that has been left in my hands should be simple enough: we need an FIA-legal race seat to replace the battered UltraShield that came with the car. But when it comes to racing seats, as with so many other things in this world, nothing’s quite as simple as it should be.

The good things about a bent-aluminum seat: you can sit in it, and it’s cheap. The bad things: you wouldn’t want to crash in one, it’s rather painful after even a short stint in the car, and it’s no longer legal for several racing series. As delivered to us last year, the MX-5 had a padded UltraShield seat that was both painful to use and remarkably fragile-looking. It’s not legal under AER’s 2017 rules, but trust me, I was going to pitch it anyway.

The second — and most common — sort of seat is a fiberglass or carbon-fiber molded seat, like the Sparco Ergo shown below.

These seats offer some actual protection in a crash. Note the head protection bars; those are very nice to have and they are on the way to being required in most sanctions. Having been in a reasonably serious crash at Laguna Seca two years ago where I did not have head restraint bars, I can assure you that I’m not interested in racing without them. They are also slightly more comfortable than the aluminum seats. Cost is between $800 and $10,000; the Ergo pictured is $999.

Last but certainly not least, we have the welded/molded/reinforced NASCAR seats. The best among them are made by Randy LaJoie:

Note that the seat basically has its own rollcage to prevent intrusion. These seats can cost between two grand and ten grand.

Because I’m a fundamentally paranoid person who expects to rub fenders and possibly barriers in every race, I bought a LaJoie seat for my Neon nine years ago and have been using it very happily ever since. It’s the most expensive part in the car. It’s also the approximate size of a Cape buffalo — in order to make it fit in the Neon, I had to have the steering wheel and shifter relocated. Compared to an MX-5 Cup car, a Neon might as well be a Fleetwood Talisman when it comes to interior space.

There’s no way I’m getting a LaJoie into the Mazda. There’s also no way I’d spend a whole season racing in a crappy bent-aluminum seat. Which means we’ll have to go with a fiberglass FIA seat. Here’s the problem. In a street car, you sit on the seat. But a race car requires that you sit in the seat. So the seat has to be wider than your widest driver. The widest drivers in my eight-person team are me and Matt Farah. Both of us have 38-inch waists that we are working hard to drop to 36-inch waists. But even at 36 inches, we’d be far too large for the vast majority of European fiberglass seats, most of which are designed around a 30-inch waist (for “medium”) or a 34-inch waist at maximum (for a “large”).

There are a few seats that will accommodate me and Mr. Farah while still being comfortable (after a quick pitlane padding) for Danger Girl, brother Bark, Sam, and the other drivers. But they don’t actually fit in the car. Which leads to the question: “How did you race it last year, dummy?” The answer’s simple: the folded-aluminum seat was only half an inch wider, in total, than Matt and I were. The fiberglass seats, by the nature of their construction, are an inch and a half wider on each side. So we need to find an extra two inches. In a Miata, that’s serious business.

The Boost Brothers think they have the answer. It requires a lot of cutting and welding. But when they are done, we should have a Sparco Ergo L nestled snugly between the door and the shifter. Getting in and out will be very exciting, but I’m told that being in a burning car has a way of speeding up your normal exit from a vehicle by a factor of two or even three. If not… well, maybe that’s why dying is easier than comedy, right?