This year for ORRing there has been a rash of changes that mainly affected Corvettes.

As you may recall I met with Rodger Ward back around 1995 and we spend the time going through the design of the Corvette related to safety.

I submitted to Rodger the Federal testing of the C4 as mandated for a new car to be sold.

In part it showed the C - pillar is part of the frame and thus a valid rollbar.

I also had installed a AS&M 5 point harness bar and the safety belts in my C4 so that Rodger could examine the design.

Rodger went through my C4 and in the end found the C pillar and AS&M harness bar design to be up to par to allow a Corvette coupe to be in any target class/division except S.S and unlimited.

Since 1995, there has never been a failure of a 5 point harness system and in fact one case when Bob Potter had crashed and the C5 was totaled out, the AS&M bar prevented him and the jerk navigator from getting killed.

For the last couple of years in ORRing there seems to be some motive that Corvettes are being forced into different changes related to these bars/belts and their mounting.

I raise this now so that this can be discussed before MKM ORR host sets their 2002 rules into stone.

Whats your input on this ?

These bars are used in all types of racing and never have any problem, there is no data at all to show that the way the bars or their mounting method have failed or caused injury.

To me that says the designs are correct and should not be forced to different standards, since there is nothing to show the vendors design is not valid.

I rather a ORR host stay out of the legal issues if they choose to force who's product to use or set a rule that forces us to modifiy the federal mandated rules that OEM belts not be modified and then someone either gets hurt and sue the host or the feds going after a ORR host as responsible for mandating stock seat belt mounting be touched by the car owner.

Considering we not only wear the 5 point harness belts, plus the OEM belts, the stress on the belts themselves is reduced across each belt, thus how they are mounted also have a reduced load and the rumor that if the lap and croucg belt are using the same method of how the seat frames are mounted would fail on impact where again there is zero data ever showing a seat breaking out of its mounting in a crash.

Its been proven the harness bar makes the C-pillar even stronger, thus the design AS&M has I fell meets the safety issues and it seems someone wants to force users to use only vendor they are biased to rather then show test results that a AS&M system would fail.

Thus forcing Corvette owners from having to rip their seats out and double up on the stock lap bolts is not a safe or legal path.

I think if they want extra safety is to rule stock belts must be used along with the 5 point system and [b]recommend[b] but not mandate which vendor or change the makers design of mounting belts or harness bar.

Your input is important, so add you viewpoint to this important subject so that this can be settled before '02 rules are wtitten and in late spring people have to start over and rip out what they already have installed.

If you don't give your viewpoint then of course some guy who heads up tech for a ORR host will dictate what his views are on all of us.