After spending a whole day with
Mark and his new welder, painstakingly checking and re-checking
measurements to get the competition seat I bought fitted onto the
stock Toyota runners, I have decided that the driving position is
just too high.
So what to do? well a trip to
Demon Thieves to buy another set of side mounts for my seat seeing
as the existing ones were welded to the original runners:
Original side mount was welded to
runner, so this meant another set of side mounts.
As I didn't have the camera with
me when I was fitting the seat all the pics are of it installed
i'm afraid. Basically I elected to drill through the floor as this
was the only way to do it and get the seat low enough.
Right rear seat mount is in the
middle top of this picture.
A real problem here is that as you
can see that this mount is raised whereas the other side is flush
to the floor.
This is in fact the passenger side
but you can see the inner mount that is flush to the floor at the
top of the pic. Obviously drivers side is mirror image, but you
can see that it doesn't make it easy to work out how to position
the seat. The front mounts were relatively obvious though as all I
could us was the strengthening brace that goes across the floorpan
just in view to the left of the above pic.
Here is the funky new side mount in
alloy which must have saved 4-5kgs over the old steel side mounts
with their associated welding to the original steel runner
assembly. As can be clearly see I bolted straight through the
cross brace for the seat front mounts. This was extremely fiddly,
particularly when it came to doing up the bolts on the other side.
For the rear mounts I couldn't bolt straight to the floor as it
would have left me with a driving position akin to looking out the
roof so I borrowed some alloy box section and cut it down to suit.
This may not look much but it took a lot of thinking time to get
it right.
Mission accomplished. The seat is now
in the perfect driving position for me. It feels much more
comfortable than the high upright position it was previously.
Original seat height on the original
runners.
Not a perfect before and after, but
in this pic it is obvious that the seat is lower and further back
due to the seat having more rake. Notice the difference in height
of the sticker.
Seat with 6-point FIA harness.