All
I wanted to share this with you because I think it's a huge deal.
Some of you may have followed my saga HERE with mounting race seats to my E92 that allow 3 points as well as the 6 points.
To sum up, the MS hardware is not made for this car despite claims to the contrary and simply doesn't function as intended. I had to ghetto mod several things to achieve a simple goal: allow 3+6points in the car. This is what I bought from MS and it was impossible to do it without modifications.
However, the BK bar I had on that car was excellent and functioned as advertised. For the ones not familiar with BK, these guys build harness bars for many cars (Corvettes and Porsches as well as Mustangs, etc) and in our case with Ms, they provide a FULLY REVERSIBLE install that doesn't require drilling into the car or welding.
As a big plus, their bars are tested to DOT standards so they will actually work in the case of a crash.
I have to pause here to address the elephant in the room. Many people feel that unless you have a full cage or at least half a welded cage, race seats are instant screaming death on a stick. Those people also say it's better to run 3 points of the Schroth QFP than a 6 point and a harness bar.
I disagree completely, but here is what Schroth has to say about it. They may know a thing or two about safety.
Cliff notes: 6 points are safer than 3 points, period.
Fast forward to 2016 and we buy a dedicated track car which is an E90, so given the great experience we had with their harness bar we wanted to go with them again. We had also heard they had developed seat mounts and wanted to use those instead of the MS garbage we already bought.
The only bad thing about a harness bar is you more or less lose the space where you'd put tires, so instead of carrying four tires in the back seat you're limited to just two. That doesn't cut it because sometimes you want slicks and other times -true story- you run into issues with NT01s and you have to bring spares.
These are the front seats
And here is how the rear looks when you carry two tires with the bar mounted. You can see one here and one in the trunk
However, if you remove just one bolt per side of the harness bar it folds on itself!
Tachan!
What should I do with that space? Here we go! 2 10.5" BW TE:AL wheels with 275 tires plus two spare 275 tires fit perfectly!
There is so much space I have no doubt 4 295s fit in there!
A view from the trunk
It still seems like there is a lot of space... so check this out!
And a view from the trunk
This is incredible. I can transport 6 spare wheels or tires to the track without a trailer or a roof bar! How awesome is that? :dance:
Next up, the seat mounts from BK
As a reminder, my old setup was MS mounts plus Recaro sliders.
These BK mounts reuse the OEM sliders. If yours are manual the setup is manual, but if they're power sliders then you retain that. Now you can have a race seat on a power slider! This has great incredible advantages:
-bolts directly to the floor without any sort of matrix plate-- less weight, stronger, lighter in net, lower
-stiffer, so the seat is more rigidly mounted
-doesn't get noisy over time, like aftermarket sliders tend to
-the BMW sliders are built to have belts mounted above them, as that's how the factory belts attach. Aftermarket ones are not. This means the belts stay properly located to the seats, and don't tear out in an accident
-you don't have to buy them (just pull them off your seat)
The recaro sliders I had before are the best thing you can use until now. With the recaro mounts, the seats would move and I thought that was normal. Suffice to say, there is ZERO movement now using the OEM sliders.
This is such an impressive setup, super happy with it! :bow:
I wanted to share this with you because I think it's a huge deal.
Some of you may have followed my saga HERE with mounting race seats to my E92 that allow 3 points as well as the 6 points.
To sum up, the MS hardware is not made for this car despite claims to the contrary and simply doesn't function as intended. I had to ghetto mod several things to achieve a simple goal: allow 3+6points in the car. This is what I bought from MS and it was impossible to do it without modifications.
However, the BK bar I had on that car was excellent and functioned as advertised. For the ones not familiar with BK, these guys build harness bars for many cars (Corvettes and Porsches as well as Mustangs, etc) and in our case with Ms, they provide a FULLY REVERSIBLE install that doesn't require drilling into the car or welding.
As a big plus, their bars are tested to DOT standards so they will actually work in the case of a crash.
I have to pause here to address the elephant in the room. Many people feel that unless you have a full cage or at least half a welded cage, race seats are instant screaming death on a stick. Those people also say it's better to run 3 points of the Schroth QFP than a 6 point and a harness bar.
I disagree completely, but here is what Schroth has to say about it. They may know a thing or two about safety.
Cliff notes: 6 points are safer than 3 points, period.
Fast forward to 2016 and we buy a dedicated track car which is an E90, so given the great experience we had with their harness bar we wanted to go with them again. We had also heard they had developed seat mounts and wanted to use those instead of the MS garbage we already bought.
The only bad thing about a harness bar is you more or less lose the space where you'd put tires, so instead of carrying four tires in the back seat you're limited to just two. That doesn't cut it because sometimes you want slicks and other times -true story- you run into issues with NT01s and you have to bring spares.
These are the front seats
And here is how the rear looks when you carry two tires with the bar mounted. You can see one here and one in the trunk
However, if you remove just one bolt per side of the harness bar it folds on itself!
Tachan!
What should I do with that space? Here we go! 2 10.5" BW TE:AL wheels with 275 tires plus two spare 275 tires fit perfectly!
There is so much space I have no doubt 4 295s fit in there!
A view from the trunk
It still seems like there is a lot of space... so check this out!
And a view from the trunk
This is incredible. I can transport 6 spare wheels or tires to the track without a trailer or a roof bar! How awesome is that? :dance:
Next up, the seat mounts from BK
As a reminder, my old setup was MS mounts plus Recaro sliders.
These BK mounts reuse the OEM sliders. If yours are manual the setup is manual, but if they're power sliders then you retain that. Now you can have a race seat on a power slider! This has great incredible advantages:
-bolts directly to the floor without any sort of matrix plate-- less weight, stronger, lighter in net, lower
-stiffer, so the seat is more rigidly mounted
-doesn't get noisy over time, like aftermarket sliders tend to
-the BMW sliders are built to have belts mounted above them, as that's how the factory belts attach. Aftermarket ones are not. This means the belts stay properly located to the seats, and don't tear out in an accident
-you don't have to buy them (just pull them off your seat)
The recaro sliders I had before are the best thing you can use until now. With the recaro mounts, the seats would move and I thought that was normal. Suffice to say, there is ZERO movement now using the OEM sliders.
This is such an impressive setup, super happy with it! :bow:
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