ERA289FIA
I am the guy Doug (Got the Bug) was referring to. First off, congratulations on your beautiful ERA!
I am 6'-4" as well and hopefully soon, will be an ERA 289 owner. I have had the opportunity to look at Doug K.'s (Dangerous Doug) FIA during his build and looked into some seats as well.
I also have traded a few emails with Bob @ ERA. If not done so already, the linkage for the throttle can be moved a bit closer to the motor, giving a bit more leg room. The clutch and brake pedals can be moved a bit as well, I would assume that you already went over this when the car was being built.
When sitting in Doug's ERA with the seat removed, I actually fit pretty well !!?! Not very comfortable mind you, but I feel like I am sitting 'in' the car, not 'on' the car, as when the stock seats were installed. The bottom line for someone our size is to sit lower and further back in the car.
The seats that came with Doug's car are probably the same ones you already have. From what I can tell, the seats have too much of a layback angle and too much padding. That puts the hips too far forward and your shin or knee will hit the bottom of the dash. For me the location of the gas pedal was worse than the clutch, and you have the dropped dash, which would make things even tighter.
What you might want to try is take the seat out of your car an sit in it without a seat ... how does it fit? From there build a 'mock up seat' of sorts using some wood scraps, cardboard or carpet pieces until you have a seating position that works for you. Then take those 'seat' dimensions, like they are listed in the Krikey catalog, and see what you get.
As mentioned above, the Kirkey 'Vintage' 41 series seat would be the most correct looking seat and probably a reasonable fit. On the other hand, some of the other seats offered have more of a flat to the floor mounting scheme and less layback angle, so you can have more of a straight leg sitting position and less of the shins into the dash problem. One thought would be to call up Krikey and see if they can make a custom seat, or modify one to suit your needs, based on the measurements from your seat mock up.
Here is a link to the Krikey racing seat catalog.
http://www.mopacautosupply.com/catalogs/kirkey2006.pdf
Not having gone through the process yet, I don't have all of the answers, but it's probably finding the right combination of little tweaks to get things dialed in just right.
Keep us posted and let us know how it goes!
Regards,
- Tim
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