Gary,
I will send a picture of my roll cage. It's been redone twice; once for height, I'm 6'2" previous driver was 5'8", and most recently to widen the shoulder bar (it was too narrow to fit comfortably). As I may have mentioned before but not necessassarily on this thread, that having a comfortably driver is very important. In designing the cockpit have all the important controls in a tight circle of one hand, i.e. Shifter, chute release, ignition and fuel shut-off, fire bottle, etc so that you can opperate everything without switching hands. It's important to be able to reach everything easily without having to think where things are, you want things to be automatic actions. Arrange things in level of importance; chute release, fuel shut-off, ignition shut-off and fire bottle controls.
One of the new rules that will come into play soon is that head movement must be limited to 2" in any direction. A well designed cage should accomplish both aft and side to side movement. I sit back in my cage with less than 1" to the head rest but found @ Bonneville that at speed my helmet started to rotate back and I had to reach up and pull down on the helmet to see the gauges, NOT A GOOD THING! I fabricated a secondary pad out of 1' round tubing with a piece of roll bar padding mounted on a bent piece of .125" steel sheet about 4 " wide. The new pad is in the top quadrent of the helmet and actually causes the helmet to rotate slightly forward at speed. Lucked out on that design.
Starting from scratch like you are you can also focus on getting the driver down out of the wind, aided by a good windscreen design.
Hope this helps! This is not gospel but just my observations.
I sort of wish I had started out from a blank piece of paper, but live and learn.
Race cars are not static. They evolve as speed increases and little things become important.
Have fun and keep everyone updated on your progress.
Tom
