street rollbars/dual duty cars?

ok so i have this 90 325is that i'm working on. it's not my dd, it's my weekend , and errand car . since i drive a truck to work . i've slowly been getting it into an nice driving condition as cheap as possible since i got the car for $500, i was thinking of making it a challenge car but it may need too much maintenance work to make the budget.... either way i want to stay as low budget as possible and keep the car comfy-ish for driving my wife and myself without her or other potential passengers complaining too much, i want the car to be a dual or triple duty car , i want to do local autocross and drifting while being able to get groceries with minimal whimpering. (even though she's a real trooper , helping me strip interiors, clean with mineral spirits and steel wool ,polish alum parts , paint things , ride in cars with lots of noise , and harshness, and sometimes no seat. but she's pregnant now and i want to make things easy on her and my offspring...) the seats in the car are shot, the seat belts don't work and i have a pair of corbeau seas and harnesses i might plop in there since i'm thinking of putting a sinlge kirkey in my datsun z. also if anyone got any tricks for the e30they're welcome , brake power, handling whatever....

Now to the real question, i did see an article about harnesses and seats in the grm integra while keeping the car mostly street spec, does anyone on here have any real experience with harness bars or rollbars in a daily dutty car or close to it, i still want access to the rear seats ...and to be able to safely mount harnesses in the car for those autox / drift events....? i might do a kirkey in the drivers side as i want to keep the car in the lower 2k lbs range....sheesh i ramble a lot....

wow just found , a cpillar harness bar....better/worse?

Might want to check out the Schroth 4 point harnesses with ASM. You may be able to use them in your car without going with a roll bar if you're not required to have a bar in the classes you plan on entering.

I just sold the Schroth quick-fit 4-point I'd used for autocrossing the past few years. I'm installing a VSR 4-point roll bar / VAC mounts / Cobra Suzuka GTs / Schroth Profi HANS 6-points this weekend.

I reckon it'll be even less of a street car now. It's pretty intense as an urban car anymore anyway.

It is hotly debatable whether adding race safety cage/ harnesses to a street car is as safe as the standard 3 pt system when there are multiple occupants and users with different behaviours/ size etc.. It is a matter of hot debate to use race harness without a cage, due to the roof crumpling down on the upright seated driver. Depending on the brand of cage/half cage you install, the unhelmeted heads of the occupants are at risk in a collision. You definitely will not be putting people in the back seats of a car with a cage or harness bar..that would be foolish. The cage also eats up interior space.

With the exception of the Schroth, most race harnesses are non DOT compliant, so you can be cited. The harnesses also tend to damage the reclining mechanism of the factory seats when used often.

The idea of a safe dual duty car would apply only to the Lone user.

m (lone user, E30 M3, VSR,seat backbrace, Simpson, dual duty) .

OP described my CRX to a 'T'.

I have a 6-point custom roll cage with x-bars in the doors. The car is being built up for hillclimb races, which has some safety requirements like high density padding around the head, fire extinguisher, master kill switch all that good stuff.

I drive it around a couple times a week, mostly because it's harsh with the suspension, but the cage and harness doesn't bother me at all.

BTW I run a G-Force 6-point harness and I'm the only driver.

The general rule, as I'm aware of it, is if you have a roll bar/cage, no one should ride in back. Ever. Even (or especially) a little one, no matter how good their 5-point safety harness (otherwise known as a child seat) happens to be. Too much potential for injury with all that metal piping all over the back.

For autocross, you can do a harness without a roll bar/cage. For drifting, check the rules for the organization you're running with. I have no experience with that, but from the HPDE events I've done they all seem to have different rules (especially for convertibles, but that doesn't affect you), so make sure you meet their requirements the first time.

If this is going to be a dual purpose car, you're probably best off skipping the roll bar/cage and using a harness as others have suggested. The Schroth belts are good in that you can disconnect the shoulder harnesses when not in use, so they'll be out of the way of your back seat passengers.

See if you can find some working seat belts out of a parts car for street use. They're pretty easy to swap, especially if the interior is already stripped. I typically bolt harnesses into the seat belt mounting points, which means they'll be disconnected anyway during the installation. Get all the parts and swap everything at once.

ok so the harnesses out of my z are the three point kind, i looked up how to properly attach them and everything went real well , i wont need a harness bar and i can disconnect if i need to use the rear seat , now i need a seat and bracket ....