Ok so lately I've been researching cages and what not basically European touring car cages and all in interest of a vintage race car.

My question is why do so many touring cars in Europe have their harnesses mounted to the floor or what not when here this has always been frowned upon?

See attached photo.

I've always been told and have always wrapped my harness around the cage. Note there isn't even a "harness bar" on this cage.

Just curious the downside to this if there is one and if that's even acceptable in US motorsport. (Not for vintage just in general) Not that I'd opt to do it that way but just pure curiosity.

 

FIA does not require a harness bar, as long as the harness meets a certain angle requirement when mounted to the floor and is used along with an FIA seat.

I've heard different opinions. Some people like to mount it to the OEM rear seatbelt bolt holes, because they were designed for this exact purpose. Some people want the harness to be independent from the cage, because the cage was designed to take impact and supposed to deform to absorb energy, etc. etc.

Either way, I haven't heard either mounting method yields a higher or more serious injury or death rate. So I can't say either mounting method is "better".

 

In the US rule sets that I am familiar with they give you a maximum angle from the drivers shoulders to the mount location, 20 degrees is what pops to mind. I prefer to be mounted to the cage. In most race car wrecks I see the car tends to deform around the cage instead of the other way around.

Check out some of the seatbelt makers web pages for their mounting guidelines, and most importantly the rulebook for the club you are going to be racing with.

DO NOT LOOK AT EUROPEAN AND BRITTISH RACECARS. There are differences in FIA and US rulebooks for cages and other safety items. For example, FIA does not necessarily requre a cross braced main roll bar hoop.(edit: as in no main hoop at all) READ YOUR RULES!

 

Just to answer your question again: it's ok overseas because of FIA regs, as opposed to what the US rulebooks say. That's the short and narrow of it.

On a sidenote, take a look at those doorbars. That car may be 100% FIA (or whatever other standard for that particular race series is being used) legal, but that is a TERRIBLE door bar design. On the passenger side, it looks like one bar bolted in on a diagonal. From what I can see, the driver's side looks identical. We've seen plenty of incidents where something way more substantial than that still was not enough to keep a side-impacting car from penetrating the cabin. Would you want to follow that guy's example/standard for safety measures?

 

is the diagonal right next to the LEFT of the drivers head in that pic????

yeah... what everyone else said.

 

Seems to be good enough for rally cars and those tend to go sideways into blunt imovable objects like trees and roll down 300ft ravines.

 

Actually, they're not. Check out Racecar Engineering, very interesting article specifically about side-impacts in rally cars. Some surprising data in there.

The pics you linked are also a reinforced X, which is at least better.

 

The max recomended angle is 45 degrees, here are the relevant FIA reg pages;

 

Not sure about that cage in the first post, but in terms of FIA, some info on this site:
http://www.customcages.co.uk/roll-cages/certification

 

Wow, lots of great info in here! Thanks for all the info!

Anyone interested in the rule books for this stuff..

FIA: http://argent.fia.com/web/fia-public.nsf/EA658B00B8E24395C125765600493AF7/$FILE/253%20%2809-10%29.pdf
MSA: http://www.msauk.org/uploadedfiles/m...ors_Safety.pdf

Found those recently lol.

 

Yessur the angle of the belt over the shoulders is the only concern!