Full containment seats, Looking for lateral impact solutions Options

[ThePaintedMan]

So, with all the benefits of using a small car for racing, including costs, consumables, etc, the safety risk has always been the biggest downfall. Physics/inertia is always something that's hard to overcome. On top of that, it's damn hard to get enough room in any of these cars just to keep your head away from solid things, let alone getting comfortable.

Since we're doing endurance racing, it was important for me to preserve the ability to give different size drivers some adjustability. After driving different cars, I know that it's important from a safety standpoint to get properly seated in the car, but also for stamina - bracing one's self properly is something we don't often think about but important, especially when doing 1.5+ hours in the car. Currently my solution isn't elegant at all - it's a stock seat, modified as best I could with additional aluminum bracing and bolsters, with a seatback brace and holes for the harnesses mounted to the stock seat sliders so we could adjust for different size drivers. But it works remarkably well.

In the future I am considering moving to a side-mount, proper race seat, if nothing else for safety concerns. I would really like to retain the ability to slide the seat for and aft, and I think that is something that can still be accomplished with most seats. However, the new trend is full containment seats to protect the head/neck in lateral impacts. But the problem is, in just about every 914 I've seen, it would be near impossible to fit a full containment seat in the car with a cage and still expect the driver to get themselves in/out of the car in any kind of reasonable time if a fire were to occur.

Just curious if any of you have given any thought to this or come up with a solution. I'm assuming this is just one of those compromises that we have to make with these cars. The only other solution I've come across is a detachable passenger side restraint net, seen in a lot of the professional cars now. But I still don't think that is really intended to fully brace a helmet in a side impact.