Copyright © 1999

Porsche Club of America Out For A Spin June, 1999 Bruce Corwin Bruce968@PorscheNet.com

Last month’s column was the first half of an article on seats, harnesses and harness bar setup for Porsches. In my quest to successfully bridge the street/track compromise, I selected Recaro SRD seats and TRW/Sabelt harnesses for my 968. This month: harness bars, harness attachment points and fire extinguishers.
 
The shoulder harnesses go through the holes in the seats, over the harness bar and attach to the factory seat belt mounting points for the rear seat. Typically, you replace the factory bolts in the rear seat lap belts with eyebolts. The ends of the harnesses have clips that clip into these eyebolts. Unfortunately, for back seat passengers, having eyebolts protruding into your hips is rather uncomfortable, so we came up with a clever solution to this problem. We made small metal plates with two holes. Rather than use eyebolts, we bolted the plates in with the factory bolts, so now we have a plate that sticks up, and not into the passenger’s hip. The second hole is where the harness clips on.
 
Next, I had to choose a harness bar. I looked at several different models. One of the most popular is the Brey Krause ($350). It is a nicely made stainless steel unit, but does have its drawbacks. In order to make room for tall drivers; it loops way back over the rear seats, which necessitates attachment points to both the B and C pillars. This design also prevents you from folding down the rear seats without removing the bar, which is a job. Brey Krause makes a new model called the Harness Truss ($500). You can attach your harnesses directly to this bar, but it is only for the 911 ($550 for a similar bar for the 996) and, like all other harness bars, would still require installation before, and unbolting everything after, each track event.
 
I brought this problem to Rick Hetherington of Autobahn Performance who has built and driven everything from racecars to dragsters to jet boats. He developed a new steel-tube harness bar design that has special brackets bolted into the seatbelt mounting points on the B pillars allowing the bar to be installed or removed without tools in about 15 seconds, yet is extremely strong. After a track event, I simply unclip the harnesses, remove two clevis pins from the harness bar and everything comes right out.
 
Previously, I had the fire extinguisher mounted to the front of the factory passenger seat. Since I was changing seats anyway, I decided to mount the extinguisher directly to the harness bar. This has worked well and frees up the passenger side foot well. Either location seemed good though.
 
Unfortunately, this was a custom-made harness bar and the cost to custom make such a contraption one at a time is prohibitive. So unless a manufacturer decides to build a similar bar, it may not be a practical solution. If anybody out there has a manufacturing facility and would be interested in making these devices, I would be happy to share what knowledge I have. In the meantime, your best bet would be to go with the Brey-Krause, unless you need to fold the rear seats down, in which case you might explore other brands, or even a custom bar of simple design.