355 Challenge - new custom cage...

Looks like he did a great job, do you take passengers along often on the track?

 

Very cool, that must be interesting to get in and out of.

Looks great.

 

Looks like it might be a little more easy to get in with the cage more into the door like that.

 

Rob,


I hope you don't mind a couple points you may already know. First racing is a compromise so you may have already thought about those things but incase you did not"

I notice you have hans specific belts. Your belt spread on the harness bar looks too far apart. Should be 3" max inner edge to inner edge. You can find exact data for your helmet to harness bar distance from HANS or Scroth. Ask Joe at HMS motorsport he is the Scroth guy.

Since you went this far...I wonder why pros 99% of the time fail to add vertical support bars to the sill from the lower nascar bar? Nascar bars work by mass and can bend into you as much as they are currently bent out before they are supported by the B and A piller. Sill support helps to prevent that. That is what nascar does you can look at their chassis. This is old known technology. Without sill support you are safer and lighter with an X door bar. Upon impact the X is immediately supported by the A and B piller. For the X to fail the A and B must fail. However, you may have an SCCA issue with stiffening a chassis by too many connection points. You have to check rules. They may not allow sill plate connection. If they do not I would run X-bars unless I absolutely had to have the NASCAR bars to help ingress and egress. Either way you are so much better off now than with the OEM challenge boltin cage. What a joke that thing is.

Also, it is nice to have a nozzle for the passenger but in a typical 10lb system 3 nozzles is all that is supported. If you do 4 you cut the spray down quite alot. You only have a small bottle and 200 psi to power it. I would do 1 dash high, 1 cell, 1 motor. If no cell then 2 motor one on each side by headers. There have been some good FC posts and pictures of 355c's with front cells if you are considering one.

It is amazing how stiff the car will get with a welded cage. I welded all the way through the firewall into the front suspension. The car got so stiff I had to learn how to drive it all over again. When I first drove it I thought something was wrong. I learned to love it and love stiff a chassis. I think more could be gained by welding to the A and B piller and rollover hoop to roof too as my 348 still had some play. But again I don't think T-1 rules allow that. I'm building a Z06 vette for T-1 maybe I'll see you on track sometime. We could have a field of 10 T-1 vettes by years end and more in ST2 where rules allow more mods.

 

Rob, car looks great, good luck.

 

I do not have a paint program so it is doctored. Look at 1,2,3,4 These are the A and b pillers welded to the sill tube as well as the sill support from the nascar bars to the sill tube.


This red picture is how most guys do it. Totally unsupported. A smart Fchater could do a simple rollcage box and run it through a finite analysis program and prove an unsupported nascar bar is not as strong as an X bar.

The black and white picture is extremely old and you can see the nascar technology of the day even using a sill tube back then.

This is nothing new but club racers are integreting nascar bars into their cars but are not as protected as they think. I'm not sure why pro builders avoid sill support as the ultimate pros...nascar has proven them a long time ago and still uses them on the current COT car.

Anyway you can either add a sill tube or weld to the sill and use some reinforcing plates like the A and B pillar anchors you currently have. In my opinion you need this if you do nascar bars. But I am a chicken early to adopt hans, hans specific harnesses, right side nets, and full containment seat.
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