Now we have had a chance to look at the DDR GT8 chassis supplied to us, there are a couple of major issues.

1 – Height inside the cabin. It’s worse for me since I’m 194cm tall, but the bars that come from the main windscreen bar to the main hoop are quite a bit lower than the fibreglass roof of the car so that means that they’re right next to my head when I sit in the car.  It will be dangerous and it’ll be uncomfortable and ugly so that’s got to change.

2 – Pedal position.  Zac and Bam spent several minutes laughing at me when they saw the size of the cabin and for sure it’s going to be “cosy” but definitely workable with some serious modifications mentioned above. We’re also going to need to cut and redo some of the other bars as DDR have left quite a bit of room in places it’s not really needed, but not enough in places we do.  It’s not just because I’m taller, but that’s just made it worse.   I spoke to an owner of a GT4 chassis (based on MR2 running gear) and his pedals are offset to the left quite badly like ours because I think the guys from DDR are obviously not that tall and either had enough room to not have the pedals offset due to being shorter, or have also got theirs offset and just compromised.    We’ll I’m not sure about you, but I’m not one for compromise when I’m making something from scratch so we’ve got to solve that issue too.  So we’ll be doing what we can to make it as safe as it can be and to give me the space I’m after.

Overall, there’s plenty of room inside, it’s just badly positioned so we’ve decided to cut the front windscreen bar out as it’s also too far away from the body and will block the view through the front pillars as well as being ugly. So the front windscreen bar is going as well as the two main roof bars and then we’re going to remake them higher up in the roof and closer to the front pillar.

The other thing we’re going to focus on is removing the steel floor and panels around the side as it’s all very heavy, going to rattle and be noisy and our plan is to use a composite tub setup instead over the steel frame so there’s no need for it, so it’s all been removed.  Not only that, but we’ve saved over 45kg in weight believe it or not !

It’s great to finally get the chassis down sitting at what will be its normal road ride height and its new wheels and tyres on.  For some reason it’s really just a good feeling to have it starting to look like a car, even though it’s so far away from being usable.  Little victories !

There’s a newer entry in this story, please click here – FZ12 – Part 10

If you’ve missed the last part of our story then click here FZ12 – Part 8

or if you want to go right to the beginning then click here FZ12 – Part 1

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