Nissan 370Z Forum - 4 point harness for Auto x only

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- - 4 point harness for Auto x only (http://www.the370z.com/track-autocross-drifting-dragstrip/91177-4-point-harness-auto-x-only.html)

Meh...I use stock 3 point in the BSP car.

Well, like I said, it's all a tradeoff...

But... the stock 3-point system is known to be a coherently-designed safety system. The stock seats, belts, body, etc work together as a system that's seen fairly rigorous design and testing.

A fully-caged race-car with 6-points and helmets and HANS and heavy rollbar padding (and everything else: window nets? footwell padding? fire system? etc) is also a well-designed system that will protect you even better, but has some sacrifices (cost, more difficult entry/exit, visibility reductions). Still, totally worth it on a track car.

What sucks is the middle-ground.

On the street you can't do a full safety setup like that because (a) it's completely impractical and probably illegal in your jurisdiction depending how the seatbelt (etc) laws are written and (b) it's not at all safe without a helmet on (cage bars impacting your skull even with padding in low-speed incidents), and you need better visibility than a helmet (+cage, +locked-down shoulders) provides in order to safely navigate street traffic, unlike on a racetrack with other like-minded drivers and course-workers, etc.

So when you've got a street-driven car that you also want to use in track events or autocross, it's tempting to add a few racecar safety features while ignoring the rest on the idea that some is better than none. Some of these combinations of partial safety upgrades are more-dangerous than just staying bone stock.

The two glaring examples that get repeated over and over (and have already been hit in this thread): 4-points (other than the Schroth ASM) due to seat restrictions -> no anti-sub protection in an impact, allowing your lap belt to crush your internals, and shoulder harnesses without a rollbar over your head -> paralysis or death from the car crushing your spine because your body can't move out of the way in a rollover. In incidents where those factors come into play, the driver would've been better off with the stock safety system than with the half-upgrades.

In the end it's up to you where you want to make tradeoffs and how you evaluate risk, but at least make an informed decision rather than a random one :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by wstar (Post 2860891)

Well, you can extend that logic indefinitely. What are the chances of *anything* going wrong? Why even wear a helmet? It is important to reasonably protect yourself.

It's contradictory to say you'd use a 5-point if it weren't for the seats, but don't see the value in the Schroth ASM. The whole point of it is to provide the safety benefit of the 5th point, without a 5th point, for mostly-stock cars. Any collision from a frontal angle is going to benefit from having 5/6-point or ASM. You don't want your body trying to push under the lap belt (not that your body gets very far with that effort, but that allows the lap belt to ride up off your hips and into your gut, which can cause pretty severe internal injuries).

If you want to be rational about it, you could make a pseudo formula (sort of like the Drake Equation), that goes like: Value of Anti-Sub feature = Risk of major forward collision per year * value to me of having a functioning liver and/or not walking around with a colostomy bag for the rest of my life. Then compare that value to the additional cost of the ASM. I don't know about you, but for me that risk level would have to be insanely small to make it not worth it, because I put a lot of value on my hobby not crippling my internal organs.

Same sort of logic applies to multiplying out the tiny tiny chance of a rollover vs the value to you of not being paralyzed or killed one weekend. The odds may be tiny, but the loss is tremendous. It doesn't cost *that* much to stick a 4-point hoop system in a car and buy some level of protection.

I should have been more clear. If I were to add the harness bar and harness to the car it would be because its a cheap mod for autox. And due to the low risk of crashing I would rather get a cheap 4point harness or 5 point harness if it were possible since most can be had for $80 bucks or so. If I were to go with an ASM belt that is 300 bucks which cost more than the harness bar I would have to do more consideration as now I am looking at $500 for a small benefit. The price of the whole package would exceed the benefits that the harness would give me over my cglock.

I will have to think about it more and maybe just do control arms since they are not that expensive and would give me much more benefits to my time over the harness setup and I wont have to worry about safety.

Thnx for your input