That little bit extra

The cockpit of a car is where it all happens. You can have a stunning interior with hand stitched leather, crystal shrouded gauges and a 40 speaker sound system, but it all means diddly if the driving position is not right. To start with the seat to steering wheel to gearshift to pedal geometry needs to be just right. You don't want the pedals offset to one side or the steering wheel too high. These seemingly small things can totally ruin a great car. This is even more important if the car is going to spend time on the track. 

Craig had spent many hours and a couple of cars developing the geometry aspect of the driver position so I was confident that was going to be fine, besides I had test driven a couple of his cars already. However, what my test drives did confirm to me was that while the position needs to be perfect, the equipment the driver uses also needs to be good. This meant I would need to put some serious thought into items such as the seats, steering wheel and dash cluster.

It was time to hit Google.

First up was the gauge cluster. The traditional approach would be to populate the allocated space with a bunch of good quality VDO or similar items. Problem was that I wanted lots of information. I needed speed, revs, water temp, fuel level, oil pressure and oil temp at least. This was six gauges of which two are large diameter. The chance that a number of the smaller, and arguably more important, gauges would be obscured by the steering wheel was very high. There was only one solution - to go for a digital dash. A digital dash is a nice compact LCD display that combines all sorts of information into a single screen. There are pro's and con's as with all things, but I was pretty sure the digital dash idea would work in the Type 6. 

After a couple of weeks and serious Google abuse I had decided on the DASH 2 from Race Technologies. This option seemed to offer the best combination of features for the best price. There was also local representation in SA and the units where currently in use by a number of other race car builders locally.

The added bonus of this option was that Race Tech also did a data logger that could be combined with the dash. The data logger had built in GPS, accelerometers, 16 analogue inputs and a bunch of other neat stuff that could be used to keep an eye on the car while the driver had his eye on the road. Even better still, Race Tech offer the two items together in a package deal that was very attractive landing at around the same price as a set of VDO gauges. The order was placed.

Now that the dash was sorted out, attention fell to the two other main components of the driver experience - the steering wheel and the seats.

The steering wheel was fairly easy. My Lotus had been fitted with a Moto Lita wheel which was nice and chunky. I also happened to know that Moto Lita made wheels to order. You could choose your size, boss type, colour, finish and design. I trawled over to their website and duly ordered my custom wheel. It took a while to arrive, but was definitely worth the wait!

Now for the final, and possibly most important item - the seats. Lack of choice in this space was not going to be the issue, that was for sure. Seats there were a plenty, but I did not want to spend a whole bunch of my budget on a seat that made by butt go numb after 10 minutes.

This was going to take a little longer...