Hmm. Long time no update. I've been doing some thinking. I really want to streamline my automotive mayham some. I have to much stuff and to much of it sits around doing nothing.
So now that the LMP360 is "done" and has shown that it is competent on track the MG becomes somewhat unnecessary. In fact I only drove it 3 times this year, once before the Gridlife event to make sure it worked, at the Gridlife event, and to a Cars and Coffee. The 360 by virtue of it's cage design is simply the better choice for a track car, and the two cars are very equal at Autox with neither being particularly competitive in class. The MG has a big advantage though. It wears a plate.
The MG is street legal, but I don't drive it much. The reasons I don't drive it a lot are:
1. It doesn't have turn signals. Those are kinda necessary.
2. It's kinda uncomfortable. The seats are very upright, on track I can handle 20 minutes in the car but that's about it. On street because you aren't moving around as much I get pretty bad cramps in my hips because the seating position is basically 90* upright.
So what do I do? I could sell it and buy something more streetable. But that opens up my Liability concern can of worms, and I put a lot of effort into the car so keeping it and enjoying it makes more sense.
So I'm leaning towards modifying it.
I can't recline the seats any further because the harness bar and diagonal are right there. I could move the driver's seat back using a bent harness bar, but then my head would be inline with the rollbar which is bad.
Here are a few pictures because pictures are best.
The chassis is built to be 1 piece with the rollbar. This is an excellent design for a car that will never change, but redoing a full floor to top regulation rollbar basically will require cutting the car in half. That's work I could do. But I'm not sure the car has to maintain a fully "Legal" cage. The most it will ever do is HPDE which for convertibles just requires a 4pt bar.
So I am leaning toward cutting the bar off. Here are some pictures showing what I am thinking of doing.
I would cut the main hoop at the top of the rear horizontal. I would redo the upper side impact bar lower to this new node. I don't plan to restore useage if the doors so the current layout is fine but I may investigate bent bars to make a more functional door opening.
A gusseted pad would be made behind the old vertical roll bar with a new tube down to the floor that would take any vertical loads. A permanent harness bar would be installed at this pad to tie everything together.
Then a lower (possibly bolt in) 4pt bar with diagonal would be added. I probably will be able to reuse the cut out existing hoop, unless it's to wide for the rear parcel shelf. This would be about 6" back and 6-8" lower then the existing. This should allow reclined seats to be used improving comfort of the car immensely, while still giving head clearance. Probably something more like lotus Elise seats then the Kirkeys, but I may make my own carbon Fiber ones because I've wanted to do that for a while.
I believe this would still be accepted by most HPDE if I ever ended up driving the car on track again. And If I ever decided to use it seriously again I would cut the chassis appart and fix it with a modified main hoop that goes to the floor.
So I'm not sure when I will get to it, but I may be Sawzalling the MG soon. It would be great to be able to drive it more and that's more important that maintaining 2 legal caged race cars. The rest of what it needs is pretty easy stuff. Maybe I would paint it also.. .
I will keep this updated as I go but just wanted to chat about what was going on.