The Ideal Sim Racing Seating Position

[Music] hey guys it's jorge here and welcome to the channel for another track racer video where today we are going to be using the track racer tr80 cockpit that i am sat in here to demonstrate a pretty ideal gt style seating position obviously this video should be some interest to you if you've already got yourself a rig but if you are in the market of potentially purchasing a rig in the near future then this should be of some interest to you as well what i shall also do is down in the description below is leave a couple of links to the track racer uk and eu stores if you do click on one of those links and then end up purchasing one of their products through that link i will get a small commission from that and obviously that would be very very much appreciated i'll be very thankful for the support with that but feel free to go take a look consider track racer as one of the possible rig options as they got a whole bunch of products there on their websites so as mentioned the styler seating position that we're going to be talking about here is going to be the gt style seating position the main reasons for that is obviously this truck racer tr-80 rig is perfectly designed and suited to that position it's going to be the most common seating position that you'll find being offered by various different sim rigs on the market it's probably the most versatile when it comes to using various different accessories such as a heat shifter or a handbrake it's going to be much easier to use those accessories and it's also probably going to be the most comfortable seating position for you uh especially if you do spend quite a bit of time actually sat in the rig itself and spending a lot of time driving so let's actually talk about the various different aspects of the gt style seating position and let's actually start off with the seat itself as you can see i've got the seat with quite a bit of a recline here this is actually the maximum that this seat is going to recline too i've got the screw here mounted into the highest position that it will possibly go to and then this bottom screw here is down in the lowest bracket lowest position that it will possibly allow that's allowing this maximum amount of recline that i've got here you kind of want the seat in to be kind of no more reclined than this uh if not more upright not completely upright but what you want is support from your lower your lower back right at the base all the way through up to between your shoulders and up to uh the basically the base of your neck if you're having that contact between uh your back spine and the actual seat itself it's going to be nicely supported you're not going to be putting your back muscles through any strain kind of holding you in any position or anything like that that's obviously going to create an awful lot of fatigue and cause backache if you're doing it for extended periods of time obviously if you need to use lombard support do so obviously what you want to be doing is looking after your back as much as possible but when you're in this relaxed seating position there should be contact all the way through it should be nicely supported between your base of your neck back here and your shoulders there should be an inch or two there just to give you plenty of room so that when you're actually steering and turning the wheel that your shoulders aren't getting interfered with the actual seat itself as you can see there's quite a bit of bolstering here on this rally style steep not quite as much as the gt style seat that track racer offers that's a lot more actually wrapping up around the side of your head here but basically when i'm in this position there's a nice bit of room there so that when i'm turning the wheel my shoulders aren't knocking against the seat it's not interfering with the range of motion it's not distracting me from the actual driving itself now when it comes to the base cushion of the seat what you want is something that's not going to interfere with you pressing all the way down on the actual pedals obviously what you want is some support underneath the thighs but if it's extending out too far it's going to prevent the range of motion going through your legs and pushing down on your pedals it's also then going to actually require you a little bit more force to actually hold your right foot down on the throttle which is obviously going to be where you're going to be spending the majority of your time obviously accelerating down the straights so when you've got your foot in this position obviously you don't want to be pushing down through the cushion in order to actually press the throttle 100 because obviously you're then going to be exerting a lot more force through your muscles you're going to be engaging your muscles a lot more which is going to wear them out and fatigue them quicker so obviously have that support underneath the thighs but don't have so much so that it's interfering with the range of motion trying to lift my leg up there so you can see it on the other side when i'm actually pressing down on the brakes so yeah try and have something that is comfy got a slight recline on it that provides plenty of support from the base of your back all the way up to your shoulders and the bottom of the neck but then has a little bit of room so you're not having any interference when actually steering and likewise with the uh with the cushion on the base of the seat that there's plenty of support there but it's not extending too close up towards the knee that is preventing you from actually depressing the pedals down without heavily engaging your muscles and having to push through the cushion and exerting yourself that way so the next aspect that we're going to be talking about is going to be the wheel and the wheelbase we're going to be talking about the height position how far it is away from you and then also the angle and the tilt what i've got here with this setup is pretty much ideal for me ideally what you want in terms of your till is it to be roughly pointing towards your shoulders so if you were to imagine drawing a line coming through the steering column and out of the wheel rim that is pointing to roughly your shoulders in and around this area basically what that will mean is as you're turning the wheel you're not having to put any additional stress or strain through your wrists in order to turn the wheel appropriately so if you get that angled right you'll be doing yourself a bit of a favor there and then it's just going to be a case of getting the height and also the distance away from your body to be correct generally what you want in terms of height is that when you've turned the wheel through 90 odd degrees that the top of the wheel is going to be roughly in line with your shoulders you can probably see that it's slightly higher than my shoulders where they where the top of the wheel is currently sat here but i'm not feeling any additional stress having driven through two two and a half hours of straight driving uh when driving in that position obviously it's a little bit too high and you're gonna be raising your shoulders up a little bit you're to be a lot more tensed up around your upper back so trying to get that wheel position is obviously going to be key to minimizing fatigue there so that's generally how you tend to find uh the wheel height is making sure that the top of the steering wheel and where your hand is is kind of roughly in line with your shoulders if not slightly higher where it is here but not too much or slightly below there's not going to be any stress there and then when it comes to distance generally what you should be doing is when you put your arms up on top of the wheel and resting resting your arm up at the top like this with a slight uh slight bend in your elbow you should be having the top of the wheel rim resting somewhere between the halfway point of your forearm and your your wrist if you do that when you're holding the wheel in the three and nine position what you'll get is a nice bend coming through your arm here and this should be somewhere between the region of 90 and 120 degrees obviously if you've got the wheel too close to you you're going to be scrunched up a little bit more probably what you also find is when i'm kind of doing this here pretending to hold a wheel in front of me my elbows and the back of my arms here are actually making contact with the with the side of the seat so when i'm steering through the range of motion my elbows are obviously going to be knocking into the sides of the seat which is obviously going to be very distracting if i then put my arms out to kind of avoid that and keep it in that same position you're limiting your range of motion a lot more unless you start to actually lean over in the direction that you're steering and obviously that's not going to be ideal because then you start using the back muscles and you're putting more wear and fatigue through those so what you should be is in a nice relaxed seating position nice 90 to 120 degrees bend in your arm there and you should be able to rotate and turn the wheel through 180 120 yard degrees without taking either of your hands off of the wheel not be knocking into the size of the seat or anything like that or knocking into the side of your own body all you should be doing is as you're kind of crossing your arms obviously you'll get to a point where your two arms end up making contact with each other that's the point that you're going to need to start to take one hand off of the wheel in order to basically compensate and continue steering in that direction if you need to the only time you should be doing that is either a very very tight hairpin at extremely slow speed or if you've got an absolute ton of opposite lock on and you're trying to save the car but if you keep your hands fixated in that three and nine position that's obviously then going to give you better reference for catching any slides on the car and basically turning the wheel is going to give you better control so then obviously going to allow you to utilize the flappy panels and make sure that you can change gear when you need to through the mid corner if you start sliding your hands around the wheel and moving and manipulating them you can get lost as to actually how much steering rotation you've ended up putting through so keeping that that reference point of having your hands in that three and nine position is obviously going to be ideal obviously that's applicable to circular rims if you've got a more formula style or lmp or modern day gt style rim uh your hands are basically forced into that position anyway there's not really any additional places to grab around the wheel other than the handles either side so that is obviously going to be the most ideal position there in terms of holding the steering wheel next up is going to be the monitor position and this is going to be pretty crucial in terms of trying to minimize the strain on the back of your neck and also generally your eyes as well what you want to be doing ideally is trying to get the monitor as close to you as you possibly can you can get the monitor nice and close that will allow you to open up the field of view if you've got the monitor sat further away from you especially with a smaller screen you're obviously then going to put those measurements into a fov calculator and you're going to come out with a much lower field of view and probably you would desire to basically get the correct field of view that you should be driving with you can bring the monitor as close to you as you possibly can it's going to allow you to open up the field of view a little bit more what you can do with some wheel bases is actually put the monitor between the wheel base and the actual wheel rim obviously if you've got a direct drive wheel uh some of the fan attack bases and things like that you can get extensions uh between the actual wheelbase to the wheel rim itself that obviously then facilitates that option to slide the monitor down in between but as this t300 has quite a chunky uh servo base here and then there isn't a huge amount of room between the flappy paddles and the actual wheel room itself it's obviously going to be very very easy as i'm steering to actually knock the monitor whilst i'm actually turning the car so that's not going to be ideal and i'm there for obviously having to put the monitor actually behind the wheel base itself when it comes to the height of the monitor what you should be doing is that basically when you're sat in this position you're looking straight forward your eyes are naturally and comfortably basically looking to pretty much the center in terms of height on the screen you do that obviously it's going to minimize the amount of stress and strain going through your neck muscles and then also it's going to minimize the eye strain it's probably going to be a lot more natural for you as well obviously some people do have their monitors mounted a little bit higher up which obviously is then probably going to be a little bit less strain on their neck muscles rather than if they're looking down but then obviously they're having to lift their eyes up a little bit more create a little bit more eye strain for yourself there so try and keep basically the eye line pretty much in the center of the screen here and that will be the most comfortable for you obviously this is only a single screen obviously when it comes to triple screens sort out the middle monitor and then the other two monitors on the side should effectively fall off from that so the last aspect to talk about with regards to seating position is going to be the position of the pedals now in terms of height what you want to be doing with the gt style position is if you were to imagine drawing a horizontal line from the base of your bum base of your hips going straight out across towards your pedals that the bottom of your hill when it's resting on the pedal plate is a couple to a few inches below where your bum is actually positioned what you then obviously want to do is make sure that your pedals are close enough so that when you're pressing the throttle pedal down to the 100 position that there is a nice bend going through the knee that it isn't locked out straight or anything like that you're not having to reach in order to achieve that 100 throttle position because if you're doing that you're then obviously exerting an awful lot more effort through your muscles you're using your muscles a lot more you're going to fatigue and wear them out a lot quicker this is obviously going to be the position that you're going to spend the majority of your lap in is with your foot down 100 on the throttle so if it's going to be nice and comfortable here you're not having to kind of exert your muscles or having to stretch in order to reach that then obviously going to be able to drive a lot easier for a much longer period of time obviously when it comes to the break excuse the position here as i kind of lift my leg up just so you can see but as you're pushing down through the uh through your leg obviously you also want to maintain that same sort of bend going through your knee especially when it comes to things like low cell pedals what you don't want to be doing is driving the pedals through your ankles what you want to be doing is driving it through your legs not your ankles your ankles are the weakest part of your leg and obviously you're doing all the motion through the rotation of your ankles you're going to wear them out much quicker you're going to strain the muscles down in the lower part of your leg and the tendons there so you want to be pushing with your entire leg rather than just your ankles yourself obviously you can have a little bit of rotation going through your ankles which will obviously allow you to maintain that little bit of throttle control kind of when you're picking up the throttle coming off out of corners but as you're going down to 100 you should be activating the basically your entire leg and pushing through that rather than just just your ankles likewise obviously with brake especially when you've got a load cell pedal the last thing you want to be doing is trying to push down on a low tail pedal by pushing your ankle down that's going to absolutely kill your cast and kill the tendons uh down in and around the ankle so look after your basically your body with the entire position that you've uh that you've got what you can do is uh obviously adjust potentially the angle of tilt of the pedals i can do so through the actual pedal tray itself or the uh the pedal plate that the pedal tray is actually mounting onto but then also with these fanatec v3 pedals i can also actually adjust the uh the angle of the pedal faces themselves and how much they extend out from the pedals so i've got the little block in behind them and then also basically position the pedals so they're not quite vertical but they are close to so that when i'm kind of resting here in this position that i'm not getting any real strain going through the leg and when i'm pushing down i'm maintaining nice solid contact uh through the ball of my foot all the way on the pedal throughout that entire range of motion if you have your pedals up a little bit too vertically then obviously you're pulling your toes up towards your knee and that's obviously going to put a lot more strain down through your lower leg and kind of activating the muscles along the front of your shins there so avoid doing that because that's going to obviously cause a lot of strain and stress so getting that throttle position is going to be key in terms of maintaining throttle control likewise with the with the brake and also the clutch all pedals should be relatively easy to reach you not having to push or exert your legs too much in order to activate that and obviously as i mentioned earlier the cushion here on the base of the seat is going to be crucial for this as well making sure that you can actually push down on your leg and activate the pedal into the fully 100 activated state without actually having to push through the cushion as well so looking after your body with the gt style seating position is going to be the main thing obviously with that as i've been mentioning it's going to create a lot less muscle strain a lot less muscle fatigue and it's going to allow you to concentrate a lot more because your body's not going to be as physically worn out and you're therefore going to maintain a much higher concentration level throughout your entire driving stint obviously if you start to become physically exhausted your concentration levels are going to start dropping you're going to start making mistakes it's obviously going to cost you that time and yeah it could then ultimately affect your race so getting this key driving position is going to be absolutely vital but hopefully those various different pointers are going to help you out there if you did then please consider leaving the video with a like and also consider subscribing to the channel if you hit that bell notification then you'll be notified whenever i go live with a new video or with a live stream but otherwise thank you very much for watching until the next time have fun stay safe and take care [Music] you

Channel: Yorkie065

Views: 99,315

Keywords: Sim, Racing, Yorkie

Id: v1RBxpl6KcA

Length: 18min 28sec (1108 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021