Part 2

In a race car, though, there is also the desire to keep the driver low for both performance and safety reasons, and the seating position must be worked around a roll cage. With the seat in a fixed position, it needs to be right. A driver who has put a lot of miles in a lot of different cars, from Spec Miatas to prototypes, has a pretty good idea of how to get there.

“I start off with height,” says Tom Long, driver coach and professional racer. “Sitting in the car, what’s the visibility like? You want to sit as low as possible in the car, but that needs to be within reason. If you find you’re tilting your head up to look over the dash, that’s an issue; the back of your neck is going to get really tired holding your head up for 30 or 40 minutes. So certainly having the height correct is going to be important – lower than a street car, but high enough that you’re not hindering your visibility.

“Second is your leg length and making sure that when you’re pushing hard on the brake pedal that you still have a bit of a bend in your knee,” Long continues. “The key there is twofold: One, if your leg is fully extended, you don’t have a lot of capability to modulate since you’ll be modulating off your calf muscle or your ankle rather than your bigger muscles. The second piece is the safety aspect – you never want to have your leg locked out like that in a crash because that would cause more damage, where a bent knee acts as a shock absorber.

“The last piece would be your arm length to the steering wheel,” notes Long. “Typically, you’re going to want this closer than what you would in a street car. When your hands are at 9 and 3 on the wheel, you need to have a decent bend in your elbow. The best way to check that is with your arms straight out over the top of the steering wheel, they should be able to break over the top of the wheel without your shoulders coming off the seat too much. The reason for that is purely upper body stamina – you have more control with the wheel closer to you, plus if you’re going through high-load corners and your arms are fully extended, you’re going to wear out your shoulders and your upper arms. If the wheel is a bit closer, you have a lot more leverage on it.”