Read why Iztech Kart Racing Seats are the worlds best seat.

I first contacted Iztech after they had exhibited a lightweight kart seat at the London Kart show in 2007. At the time I was running my nephew, Freddie Lee in a lightweight ZIP Blade Honda Cadet. We were overweight despite having a carbon seat and floor supplied by ZIP. I tried a seat and floor from iztech, and managed to save a further 2kg! Freddie then went on to win the first Super One Round at Larkhall using them.

When I first went motor racing in the 1960’s a Formula One seat was made by filling a black bin liner with two part resin foam, then sitting the driver in the car with the bag around his sides and back. The foam expanded all around until it poured out of the top! Making an awful mess of everything it touched. Once dry, the ‘seat ‘was trimmed to size and covered in black tank tape. This gave the driver some comfort in the car and was universal practice for almost two decades!

By the time I was running the Toleman Formula One team in the 1980’s we had done some research, and soon realised that the driver was much more comfortable and could ‘feel’ what the car was doing a lot better when sitting in a rigid, made to measure, carbon fibre seat. This conclusion was drawn from empirical development and the benefits were undeniable! I’ll come back to this issue later on.

Back to Karting and the latter part of 2007, I began testing with different composite seats and floors manufactured by Iztech, which had were able to twist diagonally as the chassis twists. I tried going both stiffer and softer; both made a massive difference to the kart!

Several of my design team and best friends from the Toleman days were now key players at Ferrari and Renault F1. I was also Chief Executive of Reynard Motorsport for a couple of years, which is another place I met a lot of useful contacts. They have all given me a lot of support in understanding the complexities of driver / vehicle interfaces. They helped me to understand the physics of Karts and the interaction of floors and seats with chassis: Some had direct experience of Karts personally, or as I had, through their son Karting some 25 or so years earlier.

Many people running karts will know that loosening the floor tray can substantially reduce front-end grip, whilst loosening the bottom seat mountings, reduces grip at the rear. This is usually done to prevent the Kart ‘bogging down’. This practice is illegal but not policed properly by the MSA’s overstretched resources, so it has become common practice when tracks are extremely grippy. The downside is that the seat and floor together act as a mass damper and when loosened, the chassis can become very unpredictable in its handling.

The whole Kart chassis acts as the spring in a conventional suspension system, and its stiffness largely determines its handling characteristics. Generally, a rigid chassis develops higher grip levels, beneficial in cold and wet conditions, whereas a twisting chassis produces less grip, which is often desirable in hot and dry conditions. The key for chassis manufacturers is to produce a chassis, which works in all conditions!

Stiff, soft, wide, and narrow axles, at high or low ride heights can vary the grip at the rear and different stub axles, changes to camber, castor and toe can achieve similar results at the front. Weight distribution is however critical in achieving optimum front to rear balance. Constructors and teams constantly evaluate these parameters yet the seats and floors are every bit as critical to grip and balance as any of these but are often overlooked by manufacturers and teams alike!

Coming from a background in high level Motorsport has made me aware that there is absolutely nothing on a racecar or Kart that doesn’t affect performance! It has amazed me that seats and floors are overlooked in this way! I am not suggesting that they are some sort of miracle cure, although just as getting tyre pressures correct, the right seat and floor can make a massive difference to lap times!

This is really the crux of the issue: In order to optimise a karts performance under high, medium or low grip conditions it is necessary to change the seat, and sometimes even the floor! In just the same way as you would change the type of tyre and the pressure it should run at. Having several identically sized seats, but with different flexibility, makes just as much sense as having dry and wet tyres! They also take up very little storage space and stack. Compared to the cost of tyres, they represent excellent value! The same is true for floors.

Good seat comfort and fit significantly increases confidence and reduces fatigue, which in turn improves concentration. Confidence and concentration are, in my view, the two most important factors in winning! They enable a racing driver to drive faster without making mistakes. People spend fortunes to get more power out of engines, or to throw new tyres at every problem, when for a fraction of the cost, they could really step up performance through such simple measures as correctly fitting the seat!

I referred earlier to the changes I witnessed in F1 seats. Only recently an objective experiment was carried out which discovered that physiological changes take place in young drivers that make them better able to adapt to extraordinary G force, yaw, and rotation acting upon them! I touched on this subject in an interview I gave to Karting Magazine published in November 2008. Nearly every Grand Prix driver started their career in Karting and many team principles will not employ drivers unless they have a Karting background.

In the QinetiQ experiment the person being evaluated was sitting in a rigid seat rotated by a fluid drive. The subject had a button in each hand and had to press the appropriate button when a change in direction was sensed. The subjects had black out hoods and could see nothing, but two of the three F1 drivers correctly identified every direction change! And the two that were correct? They started in Karting!

This research was undertaken to see whether youngsters could be selected, with appropriate testing, that could then be subjected to moderate but extraordinary forces to cause physiological changes to take place. This would enable them to pilot next generation warplanes! Apparently, no President of the USA is likely to sanction Billion Dollar Aircraft armed with Nuclear weapons to fly without pilots!

These pilots would be fitted with rigid, made to measure seats so they are able to feel every nuance in flight, whereas previous generations of pilots were fitted to padded ejector seats! This isolated them the critical contact from the spine with the seat back. The coccyx at the base of the spine to the third vertebrae below the nape of the neck is where the spine has its receptors that receive the data transmitted from the seat. This is then computed subconsciously at countless billions of bits of Information per second! Flying fast and driving fast require no conscious thought, that is why pilots, like drivers can multi task, for example, talking over the radio whilst in the middle of a chicane!

Iztech have developed their Kart seats so they act in the same way as the seats now used by US fighter pilots. The seat has a channel for the spine and the seat flexes with the chassis to stay in contact with the spine as a driver transfers weight into, through and exiting a corner! All of the data from the chassis is fed into the seat. Our unique design and construction enables the important frequencies to be transmitted to receptors in the driver’s spine.

Ironically perhaps, many drivers handicap themselves by wearing rib protectors; these cover their spinal column and effectively block transmissions from the chassis to the spine! Drivers using Iztech seats who have been advised to removed their rib protectors, have all been amazed at how much more ‘feel’ they have, and most have gone faster without any conscious thought to do so!

There is no scientific evidence that proves that rib protectors prevent injury, but there are many designs available which protect the sternum and ribs while keeping the receptors in the spine in contact with the seat! Iztech are currently developing a protector for this purpose.

Recently, Iztech have tested the frequency range of different mesh constructions, and can now achieve very similar results over our entire range of seats. We now have instrumentation, which measures the torsional stiffness of each seat together with its acoustic profile. This is all leading toward improved driver performance.

There is further research and development ongoing for the foreseeable future to improve Iztech’s knowledge of Driver / Vehicle interfaces. We are working with several Universities to expand our knowledge of seats and floors and we are looking into steering wheels, as well as brake, and throttle pedals. All of these interfaces can be dramatically improved for ‘feel’ and as a by-product will almost certainly become lighter.

I often hear Dad’s say “we already carry a load of ballast’’ as an argument against having a lighter seat and floor, when in fact, as is proven in Formula 1, the more ballast you carry, the lower your centre of gravity will be! That is a huge performance advantage for small drivers, who already have an important aerodynamic advantage, as they punch a smaller hole in the air and create a lot less drag!

Situating ballast where you want it on a kart can also lower the polar moment of inertia, which allows Karts to change direction faster! Many Karts benefit enormously from ballast up front in wet weather, so only a fool would fit a heavy seat to avoid carrying ballast. A typical Iztech seat is about one third of the weight of our competitors!

Very small drivers, even in senior formulae, sometimes have problems with their chassis not lifting a wheel in wet or low grip track conditions. This
Obviously prevents the Kart from turning into a corner and causes understeer. Often lead weight is then mounted up high on seat backs to try to alleviate this problem. It would be much more effective to keep the weight low, for better handling when there is good grip available, but to raise the seat higher on its mounts when it’s wet.

Small drivers can be raised up to 50mm or even more above the bottom chassis rail without having any problems fouling the steering wheel; this raises the Kart’s centre of gravity dramatically.  A pre-installed rigid seat, specifically for wet of slippery conditions, with ballast already mounted as high as possible, but not on the seat back, is a much more effective solution than the soft pads, which some drivers try to sit on. It ensures good comfort and fit and, importantly, ensures the drivers coccyx and spine remain in contact with the seat rather than being isolated by a soft cushion.

Lead takes up a lot of space and has a specific gravity of 13 whereas tungsten alloys like Mallory metal have an SG of 19. This enables the same amount of ballast to take up almost 50% less space and at the same time lower the centre of gravity of the Kart. Iztech are designing ballast in Mallory Metal, using computer aided design, to precisely fit 5 Kilos under an Iztech seat: This enables a low centre of gravity and a low polar moment of inertia. Ballast in this position offers increased protection to the bottom of a driver, who runs wide over a kerb or hits debris on the track.

Before I became Chairman of Iztech I had injected the funds required to undertake some serious research and development projects. We now have digital scanners that can output direct to CAD and FEA, which allows us to look at any seat requirement and carry out computer aided design and finite element analysis both in and out of a chassis so we can accurately calculate the twisting torque passing through the chassis with different types of seat installed. We now have testing equipment that shows us how different combinations of composite materials will perform: both in twisting and acoustically.

Important data pathways are integrated into our seats so that the maximum amount of information passes from the seat mounting areas to our spinal recess in the back of the seat. We are also able to identify where we can save weight and also where we should mount ballast to avoid damping the critical data flows that provide driver feedback. Ballast should never be bolted to the back of the seat as it effectively damps out this flow of information. It is also very important the seat isn’t stressed when installed. The seat should be fitted so it sits onto mounting points without being forced in any direction. Seat mounting should be all metal in construction with no rubber or synthetic material that would damp data flow from the chassis to the seat.

We have the capability now to scale our designs up or down, so that we can make a seat to fit anyone of any shape. Many Female drivers have a problem finding a seat to fit as they are usually narrower than men in the under arm region but wider at the hips. They usually end up with a seat that doesn’t fit properly despite masses of padding!

Iztech are producing more sizes of seats; over twice as many as our competitors, designed specifically to solve this problem. We are also producing smaller than Cadet Size seats for the new Bambino class, and we will offer exactly the same range as we do for Cadets. Smaller Cadet Drivers may find a better fit in this new range as well. For taller drivers we are producing a new range of more comfortable flat bottomed seats.

Science in seats is just the beginning for Iztech. We are beginning a new era where the old fashioned methods of Kart design and construction, as well as data capture, will join the digital revolution. I foresee science in chassis with computer-aided design and engineering incorporating advanced finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics and even ‘rolling road’ wind tunnels being used to create the Karts of the future. Seats and floors will be integrated into the overall design process so that their effect can be modelled and assessed.

This is all achievable today! The only reason it hasn’t happened sooner is that the current generation of designers and engineers in Karting are not systems literate in the disciplines required! The good news is that all new graduate engineers have learnt a scientific approach and know nothing else!

It’s a time for change and no industry, including Karting and those dinosaurs within it, will survive unless they embrace modern, scientific principles to design, develop and construct products to micron tolerances in place of plus or minus a few millimetres!

The power of computer aided engineering has transformed racing car design and it’s about to do the same in Karting. I suspect that it has already begun in some Italian factories. Better performance and more consistent, high quality products will secure a bright future for everyone involved. It’s an exciting time and I’m enjoying the challenge immensely!