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At the beginning of each Formula One season, drivers visit their factories
and jump into a test chassis to create their very own race seats,
something which both Kevin Magnussen
and Nico Hulkenberg had to do last minute for the Bahrain Grand Prix.
But there is a new way these race seats are made
and with the help of Real Equipe, we're going to be making
my very own race seat and showing you the entire process from start to finish.
And for our example will be using an LMP2 car,
but this method is the same used in Formula One.
Now this whole process breaks down
into four main parts and it all begins with the founder, Vaughan Cartwright.
Yeah I'd always been involved with the race seat fit for drivers
throughout my motorsport career, progressed
all the way up into Formula One.
We are joined the McLaren team in 1997.
Having looked back at my experience in Formula One, how much
attention to detail was required took the decision to start the business.
I can say these five F1 teams that we do work with,
probably the one that we can be public about is the Haas F1 team.
Also Formula 2, Formula 3, Formula E, which we are very active
in, the World Endurance Championship LMP1, LMP2 as we're doing with you
today, it's the one component on the car that the driver can truly own.
Part one is the pre fit stage.
In most FIA racing categories.
They require these carbon fibre shells which act as the base
and then in that is where the driver specific seat mode will go into.
The driver jumps into that shell and start to pick out areas in which they're
needing more support on.
This is surreal.
My legs currently are currently arched a little bit, so I'm having to use
like the muscle underneath my legs to like keep them up just at the bottom.
Here is a small like if that's the seat insert, my back is a little bit
like that, There's no graceful way of getting out I guess?
The material they'll be making.
My first mold is thousands of these polystyrene microbeads
within a plastic bag.
This bag goes into the carbon shell and the driver sits on top
almost like a big bean bag.
At the moment, there's two philosophies in terms of making a custom seat.
You've got the vacuum version, which is this or you've got expanding foam.
So it's two liquids causes a chemical reaction and it expands very quickly.
Your position to the steering wheel,
position to the headrest, your height for legality, you lower back support
you've got to think of all that within like 5 minutes.
Whereas this way, yes, it's a longer process,
but it means we can be more methodical and more detailed and getting everything.
100% right.
The beads can then be moved
around to get the correct driving position while still make it more comfortable.
For myself, I'm finding areas where my body needs more support.
To keep the beads from moving around, we can then use a vacuum form
to suck up all the air out of the bag.
They do this process first without any resin
so they can make adjustments,
moving the beads around and finding what parts of my body needs more support
and if they need to add any additional beads they can do so!
It's kind of just moving
around with my hips and my yep, my ass effectively propably need to move
my bum a bit more forward cause I feel like I'm a bit high at the moment.
It's a little tight on my hips.
The right side
fine the left side is a bit tight to the left shoulder is pushed in a bit.
So I'm kind of like skirting around.
Yeah, it's much better moving it. Exactly.
So the more input you can give me, the better I can modify
the material to suit is actually what you want.
So if you position your legs, it's comfortable on the throttle.
Yeah, yeah.
And then again, I don't want to push you over too far.
Yeah, I feel fine. I feel very central So it.
Oh, gosh it's a lot tighter to get out.
Recently, I was lucky enough to be in Bahrain for the Formula One
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Now let's get back to making my race seat, part two and it's time to add the resin
two part resin and, and hardener it's mixed up and added into the bag
we used earlier with some added black dye, making it easier
to visually see where the resin is and that it spreads out evenly.
This has a one hour working window where the beads can still be moved around
freely around the driver
and would take about 3 hours further to fully cured to become hard.
So once the resin has
been equally distributed across the back is then put back into the carbon shell.
Back actually feels pretty good.
Yeah. Yeah.
I still get bit of pressure on the left side.
You're naturally relaxed.
They're yeah, they're good.
And you can feel the support and yeah, I can feel the spot underneath.
That's good.
I always on the side of caution make it quite tight
because we always can shave off a little bit of material.
You can't hide it.
You can edit there you go again.
It's down to personal preference.
Some drivers really like it tight across the shoulders
and other drivers just want a little bit of room
so they can almost like go kart and into a corner I prefer yeah.
More stuck on and yeah, they just needed some to a bit movability there.
I've just pushed it back a bit more on my left shoulder.
But it's fun.
You wouldn't believe it.
But I used to be a contortionist for now smooths out those sections of the seat
where folds or creases have occurred.
As a result, when we move the beads around my body
and as a bag is still vacuumed, it means it won't lose its shape.
With me not sitting in it,
I then climb back into the cockpit for any final adjustments.
But if it's all comfortable,
my job is then to sit in there for an hour whilst it all curls around me.
Well, the minimum is about 20 minutes, but ideally when it's being here,
as long as you can say,
I'm going to wait for about an hour or so
just so then all the resin can properly queue and get hard.
My main thought process was going to be like a go kart where you do
have a bit of wiggle room, whereas here I cannot move at all.
This is me trying to move like on.
It's also just quiet where things just have a have a coffee in the cockpit.
I'm waiting after the clearing is finished and I've climbed out of the very
tight seat is onto part three where we trim down the seats access.
The bag is designed to give us scope
to be able to make sure that we fully encapsulate the driver within the car.
Obviously that leaves some excess material.
So we, we cut that material off to get the seat back down
to the right profile, remove any excess material.
And we also cut out the holes for the lap belts and crash belts.
We can make sure that the seat is not interfering with any elbow issues.
When you're when you're tuning, we use an electric hot knife
as most practical way for us to be able to quickly and efficiently remove
all the excess material. It feels very wax.
It's got like butter in it.
So smooth isn't just it's a hand rasp.
So what we're doing now is just smoothing it all out, getting a nice clean surface,
just getting rid of all these little ripples.
Yeah. Hurry it up. Clean it all up.
Just get a nice and smooth across the ribs.
Normally what happens is that the seat goes back into the car.
Then I would jump in, and then you'd start to see if there's
any weird pressure points I want or taken out unfortunately,
because I've got a bit of a phobia with polystyrene, we can't do that
because otherwise I'll be trapped by the very thing that I'm very scared of.
So the guys have done an awesome job of just taping up for me,
but what we can still do is get into the car
and then sort of mark any areas with Sharpie.
If it's any errors on adjusting
or if it's pretty good, then they can just carry on like this.
Thing. Oh,
this is so cool.
The last part is to make this FIA approved
the team laser scans to see which slowly builds up a 3D card model.
This can even be sent to the teams to then create their own
carbon fiber show or a McLarens case one created using natural fibers
or really equipped can create one using a C and see machine.
This loads up a 3D scan seat and carves out the model using one of the approved
materials listed by the FIA,
which in this case is an all pro expanded polypropylene.
This has been such an awesome day and obviously none of this
would have been made possible without the help of real.
Please go check out their website.
They've got such an awesome portfolio now.
All the different type of work they do.
Massive thanks to them and also a big thanks to our sponsor today.
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Really hope you enjoy this one and I'll see you in the next video.