Thread: Nigel Mansel for Silverstone LMS
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Old 20 Aug 2009, 10:35 (Ref:2524946)   #16
Gingers4Justice
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Originally Posted by Ted bennett View Post
We had some interesting challenges when it came to seatfits on the MP4-10, that's for certain. While obviously Nigel was not the smallest F1 driver around, the problems we had were not all down to him. The cockpit was just too small full stop. It was really the signal to Ron that something had gone wrong with the design department at McLaren so he had a shake up and brought some new names in and changed the working practices. Different sections just did not seem to communicate with the other sections and a prime example of that is shown by the seatfit problems we had. A new regulation had introduced a foam pad to be fitted behind the drivers head which was 100mm thick in contrast to the previous pad which was just 25 mm. The consequence of this was to force the drivers upper body forward and reduce the distance between the driver and the steering wheel thus forcing his elbows out wider where they then fouled against the cockpit rim. This hurt Nigel especialy as he used a very small diameter steering wheel so he couldn't use his upper body strength as he would have liked.
This new foam pad was never seen when the mockup tub was used to assess driver comfort, we just used the old pad and all seemed well. Then when the first chassis was in build and we were preparing it for seat fitting some guy wandered down from the drawing office and handed us this huge new headrest, about three months later than we would have liked. This sort of thing went on all the time across many of the departments and culminated in the dog that was the MP4-10. We tried so many fixes that season that it was obvious no one really had a clue as to why the car didn't work but the team did manage to massage some performance out of it later in the year.
Shame I don't have a scanner as I have some snaps of the seatfit chassis after we took the grinder to it in a vain attempt to get Nigel in the car.
Right on cue, that man.

And that's taught me a lot seen as I was 1 at the time.

Another general question, can you make the cockpit of an LMP wider?
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