[zinner]

I just wrapped up what has been a year plus long effort to install a 4 point roll bar and fixed seats with 6 point harnesses. And I wanted to document my setup with the F30 sedan as it transition from a daily driver to a track only car.

First a little about myself. I started driving on the track in 2017 with the BMW CCA as a D student, it was a rough start Saturday, but by Sunday I was hooked. I have since attended multiple schools at VIR and Road Atlanta and currently in the A plus group and hoping to instruct in the future to help others fall into this trap :-D

The goal was to upgrade my safety and get more connected to the chassis, after having a few ride along sessions in cars with fixed seats and harnesses, I became convinced it was the next place to spend my money on the track day hobby.

Parts Bill
On March 2023 I placed an order for the Studio RSR 4 point roll bar in satin black.

Along with that I contacted Bimmerworld and ordered

• OMP WRC XL seats
• F30 floor mounting system
• steel low profile OMP seat brackets
• Lifeline Copse 6 point 2 inch harnesses.

I also picked up some

• VAC under seat submarine brackets
• VAC low profile lap belt brackets.

There was some grade 10 hardware I grabbed along the way at Ace hardware to fill in the gaps of what came with the various parts.

Acquisition of the parts
Studio RSR took something close to 10 months to get my roll bar to me and it included a lot of excuses and frustration, but I finally got the roll bar and it was packed extremely well and bolted in with no problems. Everything else was off the shelf parts and arrived in days of ordering it.

Install Notes
Lets get to the nitty gritty of the install, first there is limited info on putting in a 4 point roll bar and seats into the F30 with a lot a chassis specific info. Hence the genesis of my post. I watched the Kies video on youtube probably 10 times while putting in the roll bar, so thanks to Kies for the example to follow.

The pictures below will details the on the install and I put them in order as I stepped through the install.

The Roll Bar
I cut the carpet out and removed the padding as I have no intentions of returning back to stock.






The Seats

I remove the factory seats and put them in storage, but I bolted down the F30 brackets into the chassis using the stock seat mounting holes. No problems here, then I placed the seats on the backets and used a couple bolts on the rear location to mock up the location and found a comfortable driving position, I used some blue painters table to outline the position for the brackets because I couldn't make any bolt holes on the OMP seat bracket line up with Bimmerworld floor mounts. This mismatch required a bit of grinding on the holes in the OMP seat brackets to allow the holes line up and a lot of trial and error fittings. I had it corrected.

You can see the mismatch here


Thanks to the Bimmerworld and VAC brackets I was able to fit the lap and sub belts without drilling into the floor underneath. The sub bracket is mounted on the underside of the bimmerworld brackets and the lap on the top.

Lap belt mount is detailed here.


I encountered a bit of a mismatch with direction on how to exactly mount the sub belts.

1) VAC advises you to mount the sub bar as far rearward as possible
2) Lifeline advises you to mount the sub belts 0-20 degrees rearward, so basically in the middle of the bracket.

I decided to attempt both methods on the driver and passenger side and just seek advice from some other track minded folks. The good news is both can be done with the hardware lifeline includes.

First the rearward mount with eye bolts and snap on belts.


Second is a mount solution more inline with the lifeline recommendations. This required fixed belt mounting as the eye bolt wouldn't fit easily.


Since the passenger seat might require changes at the track to accommodate different size passengers. The rearward mount makes that much easier to accomplish quickly.


B pillar trim
The seats did require removal of the B pillar trim, but they are XL seats so might be able to keep the B pillar trim with smaller seats. It would make is very difficult to keep the stock belts as the seat would pinch the belt against the pillar. I removed the stock 3 point belt as no intention of using it in the future.



Here is the final shot of the seats and belts all installed and fitted.

This is a project that could easily by done in a weekend and didn't require any crazy tools, but a step bit makes the drilling much easier for the roll bar holes in the floor.



Track Seat Coding
Finally to remove the errors from the missing stock seats I contacted Bimmer-remote.com and had them code the ECU to remove the checks for the missing stock seats. It was quick and easy to get it completed. Thanks to kubax86

[skier_du]

Appreciate you documenting this zinner. I track my f30 regularly and am thinking of doing the 4 point and seats in the next year or 2. This is good to see ahead of time.