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January 30, 2008- For 2008 there are a number of updates Fusion Racecars have incorporated into the FRC-14. This is the first in a series of releases that will discuss some of these refinements and the reason behind them.
For me as a driver, the ergonomics of the cockpit are extremely important. The placement of the shifter in relation to the steering wheel, a good driving position that does not stretch you out to the point of loosing strength, peddle placement and many other minute details all combine to make the drivers experience unbearable or pure joy.
Before we ever started building our first car a lot of time was spent mocking up the drivers “office” so it would be comfortable right away. We even designed our own 3 peddle assembly. We were not happy with anything we found on the market so we set out to build a better mouse trap. What we ended up with was a peddle box that has left-right adjustment for the individual peddles, fore and aft adjustment of the whole assembly for quick fitting of different sized drivers and the piece d’ resistance… the whole assembly can be mounted on the floor (as we do it in the FRC) or it can be reconfigured to be hung and maintain the perfect peddle separations.
I think you get the picture, from the seating position to the rally style shifter the FRC is designed as a drivers car.
So now you ask, “if it’s so perfect, how did you improve it?” I’m glad you asked!
During testing we found a few things that we wanted to improve; there had to be more control for the passenger/instructor, there were a number of switches that were hard to see below the shifter and we wanted to increase the leg room.
We started to experiment with the idea of moving everything from the low center dash (old dash picture) up to the primary dash. If we could do this, not only would we accomplish everything on our wish list but we could also save a few valuable pounds.
As you can see from the second and third pictures we were successful in doing this. Let me give you some details of the benefits;
Lower section: by removing chopped 4 pounds from the chassis and opened up a ton of leg room.
Moving the Switches: This made it much easier to see everything and gave the passenger/instructor access to the master switch in case they need to control a situation. Moving the master also freed up knee room on the drivers side so larger drivers did not have to worry about hitting it as they climbed in and out.
New Dash: we were able to make the dash an inch taller for better component placement and move the bottom up almost an inch for leg room.
Gauges: we moved the fuel gauge, brake pressure gauges and brake balance knob over to the left side of the steering wheel for better visibility.
New Switch and CB panels: if you look close we have also incorporated 2 new sub-panels that are laser cut and labelled so the panels can be preassembled on the bench. So we will now have part assemblies available if there is every a need to replace them.
Scope creep: anyone involved in projects is probably familiar with this term. “now that we have done this we could also do this”. We got hit with our own version of scope creep on the dash project and decided to reengineer the entire wire harness. We now have a universal chassis harness that is plug & play utilizing high quality Deutsch connectors that is pre-wired for options like endurance headlights.
I hope you have enjoyed this update and look forward to our next instalment.
For more information on the FRC-14 or becoming a dealer for Fusion Racecars, please contact Dennis Bainbridge at dennis@fusionracing.com
