Without the front seats in...
Without the front seats in place, it's easy to see the Maximum rollbar's bracing and tight-against-the-headliner fit. Keeping the rear seat gives a factory look and helps with noise-deadening.
In case you missed earlier installments on our open-track project, the '96 Mustang has been getting the treatment at Maximum Motorsports. Our plan is to transform what was a bolt-on-level street car into a nearly dedicated open-track machine-that is, a car heavily modified for track duty so it's at home on a road-racing track, but one still wearing license plates that can do at least minimal street duty.
Dual-purpose cars are tough to execute. Luckily, road-course work and street driving are fairly close to each other. What makes a car go around corners at the track isn't far removed from going around corners in town. Mainly it's how much spring and shock rate your bum can take on the street.
That said, Mustangs are cursed with a primitive chassis and blessed with excellent tuners who can fix nearly any problem. To make a corner carver out of our 4.6 GT, we've teamed with Maximum Motorsports for its complete chassis package-torque arm, tubular K-member, and everything in between. Having previously detailed installation of both front and rear suspensions, this month we're headed inside the cockpit for the necessary safety items.
Fitting the rollbar's rear...
Fitting the rollbar's rear braces means bolting up the main hoop assembly so it is precisely positioned, then marking where the braces fit through the interior quarter-panels.
The safety essentials include a rollbar and a seat/harness system. Actually, all of these are interlinked and should be thought of as an integrated safety system. But to begin, the rollbar is an obvious help when the world flips upside down, and it is typically mandated for open-track cars with V-8-speed potential. Unlike a full road-race car, a cage is not required for open-tracking because with wheel-to-wheel combat reduced by restricted passing areas, rollovers are rare and less violent.
Maximum's rollbar in our car is a new part. Having done land-office business in NHRA-legal, drag-style rollbars and SCCA-legal cages for years, Maximum is well acquainted with what's needed. For our car, the company took the back half of its road-racing cage, deleted the front hoop, and added low-lying forward braces. The result is stout rear and diagonal bracing, along with some forward bracing, minimally improved side-impact protection, and excellent ingress and egress for the front seats. Considering the open-track environment, the trade-offs between safety and utility make sense to us. Maximum is also adding this rollbar to its catalog-look for it this fall with a price likely just north of $400.
With 1 1/2-inch-diameter, mild-steel tubing, Maximum's open-track rollbar could be SCCA race-legal in cars up to 3,500 pounds. Our heavy, street-oriented Mustang is actually a bit more than that limit right now, but if put on a road-racing program, the resulting weight reduction would bring the car within the 1 3/4-ton limit. Thus, should we eventually want to go road racing, we could gut the interior and doors, fit lighter wheels and so on, then add the front hoop and heavier door bracing of Maximum's racing cage to arrive at an SCCA-legal road racer.
Now the main hoop, rear braces,...
Now the main hoop, rear braces, and interior panels can be fitted in one big step. As this leg-press maneuver indicates, it can take some muscle to get the springy hoop assembly tight against its mounting holes.
After marking the panels,...
After marking the panels, remove the main hoop and panels and get busy with the hole saw. This is the junction that is often slotted to allow fitting the rollbar and then this plastic panel, but at the expense of an ugly slot in the panel.
Ford's plastic is yellow under...
Ford's plastic is yellow under its surface color, so you'll want to blacken the edges of the hole with a felt-tip pen. This view also shows the foam sound deadener on the panel's backside. You must remove the forward section of foam to fit the panel in the car at the same time as the main hoop and bracing.