RTFM

I feel the need to defend my buddy Ben Schaffer from Wes Siler’s post at Jalopnik, which claimed that Ben’s harness setup in the GT-R was unsafe. Wes claimed that, "By attaching the shoulder belts to a point lower than the shoulders, the driver and passenger’s spines will be compressed in the event of the car running into something. This will crush the vertebrae and could even lead to paralysis in extreme cases."

Now, since I’m always trying to figure out ways to improve the safety in old 60s Mopars, I’m interested in this stuff. Yes a lot of tuner kids do have improperly mounted harnesses, which are quite unsafe. But Ben is no tuner kid. When I asked Ben about the setup, he wrote back, "simply put, those harnesses were installed by a professional race shop to the recommended spec of the Takata harness installation guide. That’s the best install anyone with a gt-r will get without making a custom harness bar."

Now, I’ve typically heard you want to keep the angle to 15 degrees or less (and various sactioning bodies have different limits), but Takata seems to think that something in the neighborhood of 25 degress is within spec. So there you have it folks. RTFM.