Re: Car search help for a newbie team
Not trying to say MY way is the RIGHT way. Just saying it was a culmination of the right choices for me with the car I was caging and the intended use at the time I was caging it.
For example, I wanted to keep the door speakers so I did not bow the bottom door bar out as much. Tunes are important to me while apexing. Also, I wanted to be able to put the stock seat back in the car when not racing, so I mounted the race seat without hacking up the stock seat mount locations.
Caging the car I've found is very much about compromises and a huge "order-of-operations" problem that needs solving. If we wanted the cage elements to be as far away from the driver as possible, we'd build an exo-skeleton type cage.
Where you place your Hoop in relationship to the B pillar will be dictated by where your seat will be, how big your drivers will be/how much seat positioning variance you need, and also how you want to design your doorbars. If you go so far back to be up on top of that rear seat bottom, you may find yourself being in a pickle when it comes to doing 360 welds on your doorbars or even doing nascar type doorbars without having to cut the B pillar on your chassis, or needing to do an "S" bend in your doorbar to get around the B pillar. Different organizations have differing opinions on S bends. One of the worse compromises, I feel, is making the main hoop narrower or positioning it more inboard just to make getting the nascar doorbar angle more direct and clears the B-pillar without the need to do an S bend.
Having someone else do your cage means that they will be making a lot of those decisions for you and while you are not present. When they are getting paid to build a cage that passes tech, the choice between what is easier to execute and weld versus what is going to be gaining the occupant another 1" of space but be an absolute beoch to weld is an easy one to make especially when both will pass tech requirements and they are getting paid the same flat rate. I've seen cars with no dash in them STILL be so goshdarn far from the A pillar that I could get my leg between it and A pillar and the A pillar bar. Why? Because it's a pain to weld the doorbars onto the A-pillar vertical when they come in at a 25-degree angle back from the doorskin and also to weld the A-pillar tube 360 without going upside down under the dash with a brake pedal in the back of your head pushing your welding mask out of position.
I've resisted posting my cage pics for the past few years because I KNOW there is a ton to critique about them and the internet experts will come out of the woodwork at eat me alive. But in the interest of showing what is POSSIBLE (albeit certainly NOT "right") here is what I chose to do for this particular car.
Driver door bar bows out whereas passenger doorbar does not because I was lazy and driver doorbars take me a whole day to agonize over and execute because I have little idea of wtf I'm doing and I didn't think bowing out the pass side was worth that much effort. No verticals between the doorbars are shown because it was one of those "I'll get to that later". But you can see how much clearance I gained and without removing the inner door skin. It was also a compromise with where it landed so I had adequate ingress/egress with the stock steering wheel. FWIW, the race seat sits WAY lower than the stock seat and the top doorbar is just about nipple level.
And in case you're wondering, here is what's under my plinth box up front and why I chose to land the cage there.
