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The main hoop was too far forward, pushing into the seats. The horizontal harness bar was mounted too low, which is pretty obvious when you saw the seats / harnesses it came in with. This can lead to a compressed spine when the shoulder belts are pulled tight in a forward crash. The rear "downbars" are also more of a drag race style that land way back in the trunk, near the rear bumper.
The owner of this Mustang (Adam) came by in late November for a seat "fitting", and we talked about modifying his 4-point roll bar to make it safer. We looked at his existing Corbeau seats (above left) which were sitting WAY too high. Then mock up a lower mounted seat using a Sparco (above right), which gained him a lot of headroom. We also showed him where an upper door bar tube would run if we built a cage ahead of the 4-point.
I was more than OK letting this car leave here with the 4-point, if we cut out out, relocated the main hoop, raised the harness bar, added a diagonal in the main hoop, and made changes to the rear down tubes. We have done a LOT of these in dual purpose street/track cars, and I stand behind those setups as the better compromise for a car that is street driven. But in the month since we started the build on this '67, Adam got the bug to go further with the safety upgrades, and the scope creep began...
We saved him a chunk of money by not going with an expensive "front clip in a box" that he felt it could be better spent on more serious safety upgrades. Full fire system, full cage, gutted doors (that then morphed into composite doors), and a stripped interior. This was all Adam, but since he waited quite a long time to get his car in here, it was hard to say "No" to more safety.
Brad removed the seats, headliner and carpets - the flammable bits that make a street car more livable but a race car more dangerous. This car had some work done previously and the front "tar paper" insulating materials seemed new. The rears were not. Brad used heat and gentle scraping to remove the tar paper, which is no longer needed when you have the carpets removed.
Read more about removing this vile stuff here.
Brad removed the same stuff from the trunk and back seat areas along with the floor mats, visors, some speakers and some other bits.
All told we removed 43.3 pounds of carpet and insulation, not counting the seats (which would go back in - or something similar to these). That might offset a chunk of the weight we will add by changing from the 4-point bar to a full 6-point roll cage.
At this point the interior was stripped, and we had cut out the 4-point roll bar. I will show more of the cage construction in a future post. Before that work began, we had to deal with the floors.
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