It’s very hard to relay just how low this car is going to be when it’s done, so getting in and out of it probably isn’t going to be too glamorous for someone of my size at the best of times.  In the original DDR GT8 design, the door was quite closely based on the McLaren F1 which was a nice design and included a larger chunk of the outside bodywork on the door and had a large opening in the chassis to allow easy access.

For some reason DD later changed the design and it significantly restricts the ease of entry and exit in my opinion, so we’re going to change it back to a more realistic design.   The DDR chassis and body we have has a “V” shaped door so we’re hoping to open that up at the bottom.

Marked in red below is the line of the DDR GT8, the yellow line is where we’re going to run the new front bar. You can see there’s a lot more room for your legs and feet getting in and out.

The repositioned bar once completed.

 

The next step is to see how the seats I’ve selected would fit and in turn, how much headroom and legroom I will have and just a general feel for the seating position.

We positioned some timber at the bottom of the main chassis rails to simulate the floor level and give us a rough idea and I think its going to work out well from a height perspective.  Although my head comes about level with the main hoop shown in the photos, the actual roof is going to be a reasonable amount higher than that main hoop, so when we re-make the roof bars we cut out earlier we can then get the body back on to be sure, but initial measurements are encouraging !!

The biggest problem, and I knew this was likely from day one, is that the chassis from DDR isn’t really that well thought out for taller people it seems.  Even their demo car has quite severely offset pedals (which I hate),  so we’re going to need to make some modifications to one of bars that’s blocking where we really should be putting the throttle pedal.  You can see from the photo’s below where my foot wants to be and how far forward it is relative to where we need.

 

We couldn’t really afford to modify the bars too much and risk weakening the chassis strength and we didn’t need a huge amount of extra space, just enough to push the throttle pedal back a little bit so I think what we’ve done is a good mix of not losing any strength but giving us the space we need.

In the centre it’s gained me 120mm and at the top 45mm so it’s definitely going to help. Would have been great to get some more, but as mentioned earlier there just isn’t a good structural way to get more space and keep the strength it needs.  I did the same thing as shown above but to the passenger side. It wasn’t needed for legroom on the passenger side, but it was only a couple of hours work and I wanted to have both sides the same.

There’s a newer entry in this story, please click here – FZ12 – Part 13

If you’ve missed the last part of our story then click here FZ12 – Part 11

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

Previous article2017 Mini Cooper S Countryman – Car Review – The Mini That’s Not So Mini
Next articlePress Release: Range-topping next-generation Commodore VXR breaks cover

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

 

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.