Update on Jamie’s Saph (295)

This month I found time to fit the new bucket seats that recently arrived from Rally Design.

I went for Rally Design’s RMD Maximum Protection items. Normally finding seats that I can squeeze my fat arse into can be tricky, but these are perfect. They’re a full fibreglass shell affair, not tubular frame, and at just £117 per seat they’re great value for the money too. They’re not FIA-approved, but as I’m not going racing it doesn’t really matter.

My initial plan was to use the existing seat runners and simply bolt the side mounts, and therefore seats to these. Perfect. Or so I thought. They did fit, and everything did bolt up, and the sliders even worked properly. What I didn’t take into account was the height of everything when it was all fitted up. I would need to be about three feet shorter and 12 stone skinnier to sit in that driving position.

I decided to crack open my case of ingenuity. Oh, and an angle grinder of course. Bolting the seat’s new runners directly to the floor wouldn’t have given me enough height, and it would have been far too weak just to bolt through the standard, un-strengthened part of the floor, so I cut the original runners up and used the mounting lugs from them and fixed these to the new runners that came with the seats. That way at least I could mount the seats using the original strengthened points in the floor, so if the worst comes to the worst the seat should stay bolted to the floor.

Thanks
Rally Design
01227 792792

Keep up with the Saph’s progress in the current issue, and updates on the rest of the Fast Ford fleet.

Posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 2:17 pm under Cars, Jamie, Sierra, Staff Cars. You can subscribe to comments.

Tags: Rally Design, Sapphire, seats