Tony, Was your friend in a Miata? Surprised that I haven't heard this story, since VIR is my home track. > I have worried about the height of the bars ever since then. I'm not > sure there is a good solution. For all practical purposes the bar > must be short to allow the soft top to function. Having a roll bar > without wearing a helmet seems risky to me. I have a HDHCHTDD and it's pretty close to my noggin with the seat adjusted so I can sit in the car. I needed it for the height as well as a Solo-I approved bar to do time-trials. Also, the bends in the rear diagonals do not give me adequate feeling of security, since Solo-I rules dictate a larger size tube if one must put a bend in a tube. I chucked the bolt-in bar for my RX-7 for the same reason (I didn't know about that requirement at the time) and had a custom one made.
Move the bar backwards and you have to lower it and thus, if you aren't very short, you aren't going to be under the bar. I guess the solution would be to have the bar pretty far back and run something like the Brey-Krause "extender" for the Boxster when you are on track. I can't remember if it was an S2000 or a Z3 but I think one owner of one of those removed the top and had the bar rear diagonals going back through the trunk-lid (it was an install for track days type of bar and removed for DD duties, IIRC). My understand is that the proper SFI padding is supposed to take the hard metal tubing and make it about as hard as the average interior panel. Even so, that has always been a concern in the back of my mind. :( --Ashraf _______________________________________________ Miatapower mailing list [email protected] http://list.miatapower.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/miatapower
