Front seats in

Another project that was a bunch more work than anticipated!

Driver’s seat I’ve had sitting on a shelf for a long time now.  In the early days of part searching, came across my favorite autocross seat for sale – the Cobra Suzuka Technology.

It’s my favorite, because the Suzuka design offers superb lateral support, without all the big head-restricting elements found in dedicated roadrace seats.  I ran a Suzuka in my 240sx and loved it.  You can also pull out the bottom seat cushion to get even lower, which is great on course, then put it back in for extra comfort on the drive home.

This is the fancier “Technology” version, that they only make to order.   I found it second-hand, but brand new and never installed, from an NSX owner.  The Technology version features carbon-fiber construction vs. Kevlar, has more durable wearing materials, and uses the same sort of fancy shape-remembering foam used in F1 cars.  A cool seat!

The seat mounts took a couple revisions.  The bottom of this seat is a bit wider than most, so the popular brand Wedge Engineering said they couldn’t make brackets for it, after a couple calls.  Instead, I bought a pair of Sparco’s universal sliders and fabbed the mounts myself.  The seat is as low as it can get, while still allowing the slider lever mechanism to lift enough to let the seat move.

Hard to tell if it’s low enough, with the car still up in the air on jackstands.  If not, I’ll have to forego the sliders, and attach it in a fixed position.  I’m really not that tall (~5’7″) but like to sit lower and a bit further back while autocrossing than most people my height.

One advantage of going to fixed position for the driver’s seat, would be the possibility of the seat mount stiffening the car up a bit.  For the passenger side I went with a classic Kirkey seat, again repeating what I did in the 240sx.

The Kirkey is great for a few reasons.  It is easy to mount – basically pick your spots, drill some holes, and you’re done.  It works great as a bucket for carrying things to/from events – pretty much every tire sprayer I’ve ever used leaks, but with it sitting in the passenger seat, the leak is contained in the seat itself, which is easy to dry out by removing the cover.  Since it is aluminum, should be easy to attach a camera mount to when that time comes.  It’s quite light at a bit over 16 pounds with cover.  And lastly, it’s cheap!

In mounting, tied the beefy angle aluminum into the four factory mount points, in addition to a couple other secure spots.  In ST our seat and mount combinations have to weigh at least 25 pounds, so this is a place where adding 9-10 pounds of bracing doesn’t come at any net weight cost the way “steelitis” items like the subframe connectors do.

This thing isn’t going anywhere in an incident!  Have some future plans to add additional bracing for the “seat” but this is good enough for now.