onasled and I have been talking about this a bit on mini2. Since there are more track oriented folks over here, I figured it might be worth a thread...

My to-do list for the winter had consisted of go-fast parts for my MINI... but I'm now seeing the light and thinking about safety gear. Right now, I'm running stock seats and seatbelts. When you go to "race" seats, can you still use the stock seatbelts for daily driving? I'd guess that varies by the seat. I'm guessing seats are definitely a "try before you buy" thing, for fit and how easy it is to get in / out of them... remembering that my car is a daily driver.

The back seats on my MINI haven't been used to carry people in over a year, so I can live with making them hard / impossible to get to.

What are people's thoughts on harnesses and how to mount them? There's the Scroth belts, but these have the shoulder straps coming on at the wrong angle and seem pretty expensive for what they are.


The next step up would be a harness and a harness bar - there's a Brey Krause bar available for the MINI. The shoulder belts would now be coming in at the right angle, and this harness bar is nice and light and easily removable, but now I'd be in a harness without a rollbar, which some people say is a bad idea.

Next up, rollbar. More expensive, heavier, less convenient. Too much for a daily driver?

Then, finally, full cage.

I was at a BMW club HPDE event Friday... there was also some club racing going on (not part of the HPDE event) and someone died from injuries sustained in a crash during the race.

How many people are using HANS devices at the HPDE level? How many people should be using HANS device at the HPDE level?

 

Perhaps we need a preemptive ground rule for this thread not to flame people when they say you might not need a certain piece of safety equipment. Safety is one of those issues that seems to spark heated discussion, because obviously the right answer is to have as much safety gear as possible.