Vorshlag 5th Gen Camaro Development Thread

[Fair]

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One side was the normal loop-style steel threaded anchor for clip-in harnesses, which we provided (above left). Joe wanted to use this crazy Schroth "loop plate" for all of the lower anchors, which I was none too crazy about. Apparently these are popular in the UK but I had never seen them. We did some research and sure enough, they can be used like this. So I machined some spacers and installed this loop plate at the factory reinforced floor mount for the stock 3-point belt. This is the same spot in the floor where the Sparco harness bar "foot" went, but with the proper style hardened bolt and the custom spacers, it all worked and the stock belt could still swivel properly with no slop.



We quoted the install a year earlier at our "3-4 hours per side" estimate we usually use for most cars. This is how long it takes to properly engineer, measure, fabricate, and fit a seat to a car for a given customer. Seat mounting is hugely important, and often overlooked by most folks - especially if there is an easy, bolt-in, off-the-shelf "bracket solution" for a given car. We have yet to see one of these solutions that didn't have major drawbacks.

Well both seats were installed using the customer provided brackets. We installed a pair of Scroth Profii-II 6-point harnesses into the 4 anchors for the laps and anti-subs and the shoulder harnesses wrapped around the Sparco harness bar. The initial seat mounting wasn't acceptable at all. Tons of slop and too much "wasted space" made the seats sit up SUPER high, even on the lowest mounting holes that would fit.



Joe was out of the country for an extended period so I made the first video above to show him how poorly these brackets functioned in the Camaro. There was no intent to sabotage this install - we wanted the brackets to work because the factory front floor mounts were FUNKY SLOTS that later proved to be difficult to work around. But these brackets just had a too much slop that was simply unacceptable, which you can see in the video.



I made the second video above to show how properly mounted Cobra Suzuka seats should fit. The first car had this same seat with a custom set of brackets we built along with a Cobra dual locking slider. The second car (#DangerZone) was bolted directly to the reinforced floor via the side brackets. Both installs show how rigid a seat mount should be.

We would normally have had the customer come by and see for themselves how poorly this worked on one side before tackling the other, but with Joe out of country it was difficult to explain - hence the videos. We had a test autocross event scheduled so I ran it this way, with no lower cushions to save height. It was a hot mess.

TEXAS REGION SCCA EVENT + SEAT MOUNTING VER 2.0

I will be brief but this first autocross event in the 2013 1LE was an initial test of the new springs, camber plates, and seat setup. The new wheels (see below) had been ordered but were not here yet, so we ran on the factory 1LE 20x10/20x11 wheels and the well worn and old 285mm Michelin Pilot Super Sport (MPSS) tires for this event. The tires looked pretty ragged but I had hoped they would scrub-off some of the old crusty rubber and give some usable grip (they didn't). I entered the car in CAM-C in preparation for the Texas CAM Challenge event later that month.



The video above summarizes my thoughts on the tires and seat bracket pretty well. The MPSS tires were totally shot (3+ years and likely a dozen track days on them) and we learned the limits of the ABS in low-grip situations at this event. After 4 runs of losing the ABS system completely only almost every braking zone, I had to dial back my normally aggressive left foot braking technique to get a clean-ish and fast-ish run in. It felt like I was driving a wet course with no brakes.

As you will hear the announcer say in the autocross video above, after this "dialed way back" 5th and final run I had jumped from 3rd to 1st in class, briefly. 20 minutes later when the cone sheets were audited they found that I hit a cone on this run also (like every other run that day, ugh) and I fell to 2nd place with the 2 second penalty. Still, while I knew these tires were shot (they durometerd very poorly), the car still had lots of potential. The shocks and rest of the suspension setup felt good, the tires just sucked.



But those seat brackets?? HA! You can hear the constant clunk-clunk-clunk sounds in that run, which were the damned seats flopping around in the sloppy mounting joints. Re-making those brackets into something usable was a top priority the day after this autocross event. It didn't help my driving since I was 3 inches too close to the steering wheel and that my head was jammed up into the roof sideways. GRR! I hate janky seat brackets! That makes a good racing seat worse than the OEM Barcalounger seats.




The forward factory floor mounts for the front seats have two pairs of slots on each side (see above). The factory seats have some "hooks" that go into there and then the rear mounts are bolted down. This aftermarket set of brackets tried to copy the stock hooks but the shapes were off and this is where all of the slop was.



After checking the interwebs and not seeing a proper "fix" for this (other than race cars with modified floors), Ryan came up with the solution shown above. After cutting the hooks off, these "nut plates" were fished between the slots and a hole was drilled to secure them to the floor. You can see more details if you click for higher rez images on the two pics above, but basically he made a proper threaded hole under the floor so that the factory seats could go back in one day. There is only a pair of small holes (for the M6 bolt that secures the nut plate to the floor) and a pair of bigger holes (for the main M10 bolts) added. Otherwise this can be completely un-done in minutes, since this isn't a dedicated race car build.



With the hooks and slots removed the slop was completely gone. Ryan also took over 2" of stack-up height out of the arrangement when he removed the giant hooks, plus some mods to the rear as well. Last but not least the range of motion of the slider was improved several inches by drilling all new holes, which let the seat move more rearward.

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