Ilene? Hey, ME TOO!
“I guess you were driving REAL fast this time!” I was taking off my headphones and easing out of my sim chassis, my wife had silently stepped into my little office in the basement where I keep my rig and had been watching me race, silently and out-of-sight. “What makes you think that?” I asked. “Because you were hopping and bopping and bouncing around all over the place.” she said. “Every once in a while you would lean Wwwwwaaaaayyyyyyy over. I thought you were going to fall out of that thing and break a hip.”
Yep … she caught me. This was a couple years ago just after I bought my used G27 (with pvc chassis) and started racing Assetto Corsa. I had replaced the big seat that came with the rig (it was from a Jeep of some type) with one from one of my old MGBs, but neither one did much to keep me from flopping around like a fresh caught flounder when I was driving through a corner. I don’t know where I had picked up this habit, but I know I had it … and had it bad. Talk about immersion! The problem was, every time I leaned left or right in a corner, I was pulling my eyes from a direct view of the screen and giving them a slanty view to look at. I was getting a lot of exercise, but knew this couldn’t be the fast way around a race track.
Actually, I had been through this sort of thing back in the day. I’m not a very big person, and due to my light weight, during autocrosses and road rallys, I would bounce around all over the cockpit like a ping pong ball … even when wearing a lap belt. When I started racing cars, a 5 point harness helped a lot … but that would be silly now … NOBODY would use racing harness in a VIRTUAL racing car. So I just kept at it, hoping to find a way to remember not to bounce when racing.
Fast forward to January just past. I had beaten the pvc pipe chassis (“rig”) all to flinders, heck, even the patches were coming apart. So I made the time, bought some steel tubing and built a new one, but knew my leaning problem wasn’t going to be fixed with a new chassis.
I suppose investing (as I tell the wife) in a real racing seat would fix everything, but I’m just an old duffer living on Social Security (“living on the dole” … if you are English speaking) and haven’t money for everything I’d like. Besides, I rather like the idea of having a couple of mementos from the old days on the rig. The idea of coming up with a racing harness kept crawling back into my mind. “As long as I don’t tell anyone …” I found myself thinking.
So I started looking at cheap racing harness sets on on ebay and Amazon. The prices seemed to range from about $50.00 US and up … a bit more than I’d like to pay, especially with the price of pay-mods for AC going up all the time … and then there was that whole “don’t tell anyone” thing.
A couple years ago I bought a short (4 side windows, 20 passengers, counting the driver) GMC BlueBird school bus to convert into an RV/camper for the wife and me to do some touring in. The first thing I did when I got it home was to strip out all the seats and all the seat belts. I scraped the seats, but hung on to the seat belts thinking they might come in handy for something one day. A light bulb went off in my head. Maybe “someday” had arrived, I thought as I stood there looking at the box of old seat belts.
It’s now some weeks later. After some cutting and grinding, welding and sewing and I’ve fashioned myself a 4 point racing harness set, and SHAZAM, it works so well at keeping my boney old keester in place that I don’t much mind that it looks so silly. I’m sure that it hasn’t knocked anything off of my lap times, but at least at the end of a long race, I’m not all out of breath and no longer at risk of breaking a hip. Just as long as nobody knows.
Soanyoldways, I was looking through my slides for something else the other day, and I came across the picture that now makes a nice garnish for the head of this article. I’m not certain when I took it … it’s gotta be 1975 or 76, but I do know that it wasn’t taken during a vintage car race. That picture was taken during a National SCCA race at Lime Rock Park, and I remember this car and driver because they were a perennial favorite there. The crowd loved this guy, and would roar their approval everytime he set up for entering Big Bend all leaned over like a motorcycle racer counter-steering his way through a corner. I don’t remember if the regulations of the day required simple metal-to-metal lap belts if the driver of that red TR3 was supposed to be wearing his harness, but somehow never did, but he NEVER got black flagged. For the times, that car got around Lime Rock Park faster than a bad rumor, and the faster it went, the further the driver would lean out of it when he was in a corner. All well and good, I suppose. So long as nobody breaks a hip.
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