Recaro Evo 9 MR seats

[bertvorgon]

You can lower the steering wheel also, if that helps get the driver to steering angle and distance better.

I am not tall either so I lowered the steering wheel a tad to be more in alignment with my shoulders.

[eastbaysolo_73]

You can lower the steering wheel also, if that helps get the driver to steering angle and distance better.

I am not tall either so I lowered the steering wheel a tad to be more in alignment with my shoulders.

Wasn't aware the column could be lowered? How do I achieve this bud. Thanks for the input .

[bertvorgon]

Here are some pics of my lowered steering column. For anyone that is going to drive their 510 in a more spirited fashion, getting your seating position correct is one of the fundamentals of setting up a car IMHO. I have spent many years around race cars and getting the driver set up has always been priority one.

Back in the 70’s when I started Solo I also taught at the driving school. As there was still a wealth of British and other maker’s cars, I started to see how horrible the seating positions were.

Some of the English cars had such bad pedal offset from the driver’s seat center it was terrible.

We are lucky are 510’s are pretty good that way, but, as G-force builds with today incredible tires, you need a seat that will hold you tight, and, your arm and seat height to be in alignment with the wheel.

I’m not a tall person but even at that, I did not want to lower my seat to the point that I was unsure where the corner of the car was. I welded the 510 factory seat adjustment to my bucket seat and then played with shims to get the thighs at a good angle.

In later years I had my seat re-done with denser and higher thigh support foam.

Then, to get the steering wheel down some, I put ¾” spacers in the mounting area so the wheel itself came down almost 1” at the wheel. This let my arms still stay bent, you do NOT want straight arm steering, as this limits your leverage. This let my hands be at mid chest on the wheel, very comfortable on long distance drives. For racing I did have to cut out and re-bend a section of the seat so my elbows could swing freely under racing conditions. For severe cornering, again, you do NOT want to hold the wheel for support, that should come from the seat holding your hips tight and the seat belt across the hip bones, NOT the stomach, should it all go wrong.

I also went with a larger steering wheel for the leverage it gave me, specially for Solo use, and, I put the shorter steering arms in for slightly faster steering response. When I look back and think the 12” drag car type steering wheel was the flavour of the day in the 70’s in a 510, I wonder how we even drove those cars.

I have mentioned before, I put a 1” spacer into my brake pedal, both for a more lineal feel and leverage, but, it also gets the pedal down further for excellent heel and toe.
This may sound silly but, I even kept one pair of flat and smooth bottomed shoes for driving and set the seat position up around that. I can notice the difference of ¼” in shoe thickness change. I have 2 seat position settings in my car, marked on the seat rail, one for my street shoes and one for my “race shoes”. That way my “feel” for the clutch, gas and brake is always consistent, something very important when racing or very high performance driving.

Once seat position was attained I then heated and bent my shift lever over so it required NO reaching to get to 3 and 4th gear, let alone 5th. Then also, the wink mirror adjustment was finalized, as it is a hard mount with no on-the-fly adjustment.

Sorry to ramble but I thought it might be good to revisit the whole seating thing.

[eastbaysolo_73]

You can lower the steering wheel also, if that helps get the driver to steering angle and distance better.

I am not tall either so I lowered the steering wheel a tad to be more in alignment with my shoulders.

Wasn't aware the column could be lowered? How do I achieve this bud. Thanks for the input .

Thank you Bertvorgon for the great explanation and photos. Very much appreciated.