185. Making Racing Seats, OEM Programs, And Drag Racing w/ David Black

This episode is brought to you by 6XD Gearbox. More on them later. Hello, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Minnoxide Podcast. I'm your host, Harris AK. Minnoxide, here for day three of PRI, which when this airs, it's gonna be quite a while after day three of PRI. But nonetheless, we are here back at the Convention Center, here on my Ford-loving co-host, Dan, Mr. Gunnit Garage.

We barely made it here, but we're here.

Oh, we made it here just fine, I am right. The spirit of youth is here with me. But anyways, today, I've been very excited for this one for a few months, ever since me and Adrian discussed this about having you on this podcast. Today, we are here with David Black of Racetech. So just do me a favor and our listeners, give us a breakdown of who you are, your history, and then we'll just go from there.

Okay, so I'm the president of Racetech, head offices in New Zealand, factories in New Zealand. We make all of our product in our own factory. I got involved in motorsport through rallying back in the 80s, competed at national championship level of rallying in New Zealand for 15 years, competed at WIC level in New Zealand for the same amount of time. Probably my thing that got me into safety was we went over a 75 foot cliff once in our rally car and walked away just with bruised chest from the belts and very lucky really, but it kind of made me a bit more interested in what's all about safety in a race car. And so Racetech started in 1992. I actually bought the company and moved it to Wellington, which is my hometown in 98. And it was just a one man band. We've now got 20 in the factory and we've set up our own subsidiaries in the US in 2012, in the UK in 2014 and in Australia a couple of years ago. So we do our own distribution because it just gives us better control of our inventory and the money. And it puts us one step closer to our customer base. So we still have a dealer network, but people can buy online from our websites. We have an individual website for each market. So, yeah, one of the things we've innovated here is a new seat for drag racing, which the work we've been doing going to race meetings, meeting the drivers, they're all very focused on weight. So we've come up with a very lightweight carbon seat that is very safe. And so that's just been launched here at the show this week. Hugely positive responses from people. You can pick the thing up with one finger. But the technology we've used in that has really come from our work with OEM car manufacturers. So we supply five OEM manufacturers, Porsche, Aston Martin, McLaren, Corvette and now Toyota. Toyota just launched their new GT3 car on Friday. Cool looking car, our product that we'd specifically made for Toyota in the car. So we've learned a lot from all the testing we've been doing, all the crash testing. It just gives us a really good knowledge of what's required to support a human body in an impact. But it's not just about the impact, it's also about performance. So we know that our seat, the way we fix it in the car, it gives the driver much better feel of the car. So therefore, they can race harder for longer. So for endurance racing, it's, in fact, going back to when we first started with Porsche, they said to us that they put a seat in the car, had all their professional drivers come to the track. Every driver got out of the car and said it was the best feel they'd ever had of a race car. So combination of that and the cooling that we run on the seats, so the drivers kept cool the whole time. That's why they win the World Championship.

Okay, so there's a few things to break down there. First of all, I kind of want to go back to the past. So the company was started in 1992, but you got in 1998.

That's right.

So did you have a previous association with the company?

Yeah, my ex-wife and I, we had started a business in Wellington importing motorsport product. And they approached us to sell the product in the lower North Island of New Zealand.

Okay.

Which we did. And then I went to the Autosport Show in Birmingham in the UK in January 96, and saw the scale of the world motorsport market.

Okay.

Well, I thought I'd seen it until I came here, obviously. But I went back and I said to the guy, come on, why don't you sell me the business, come work for me, and we'll make this thing happen. And he laughed. And then a few weeks later, he came back to me and said, were you serious? Absolutely serious. I really saw the opportunity globally for our product. And we've obviously developed a lot of new products since then. And I think we're pretty innovative. We've got a product that's very different from anybody else in the world. We were the first seat manufacturer to have backfixing at the shoulder level in a composite FIA seat. So yeah, it's been a long process, but we've got to where we are now, yeah.

Was there a competitive advantage back then to getting a Racetech seat? Because obviously today you guys have all these features, especially with the new seats that you just released. But back then, was there something appealing about Racetech in particular?

I think it was just the quality and the fit.

Sure.

So humans are all different sizes, right? So we've got, most of our ranges of seats have four sizes. And so that allows us to fit the majority of drivers into our set. Comfort is a big part of it. And we get that comment every day when people come and sit in our seat, how comfortable it is. And so perfect for things like drag and drive. Sure. But yeah, just generally the time that people spend in a race car, we have this crazy idea that people can be comfortable in the race car.

Yeah. Typically, when you look at a race seat, you're like, that does not look comfortable. And they're usually not.

Yeah. So ours is quite different from that.

Okay.

Yeah.

How many units do you guys sell right now a month?

You know, I don't tell anybody that it's kind of okay. But never enough is never enough.

Could be more.

Yeah. I mean, this year has been pretty tough globally. But it's we can see some way forward. We think 26 is going to be a really good year for us.

Everybody we've talked to at this show has been optimistic. There's kind of been, who was it that we were talking to yesterday? It's like 24 was flat, 25 is going to finish flat. But everybody's very optimistic about 26.

Absolutely. Yeah. We partly with the new products we've got and going into drag racing a bit stronger. But just globally, it's already starting to feel like it's coming back, which is really nice to feel. There's a few challenges here with obviously tariffs going on to import products and stuff. But we think we've got that pretty handled now. But yeah, we're very optimistic of where we're going from here.

Sorry, I thought you were going to say something. Take me a little bit back even further then. You had a career in rally racing as well then. Was that the first motorsport that you had an allure to? How did you get into all that?

No. Well, my first motorsport was motorbikes, enduro riding, so I won a national event in New Zealand back in the 70s. So that kind of... I was into speed and going fast and competitive. I'm a very competitive person. I don't like coming second. And that comes down to the product we're selling to our customers as well. One of the projects we did with Porsche, they chose the seat they wanted to put into the car and it wasn't the right seat. And we told them that, but they were determined to go that route. And halfway through the project, they were swapping the seat out for something else because the seat they'd chosen was heavy and big. And the team leader at Porsche said to me, don't worry David, you're still going to sell as many seats. I said, it's not just about selling seats, it's about being in the winning cars. If I don't want to just sell seats, so I actually want to be at the pinnacle, yeah.

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Yeah, just stages of my career really. So I rode dirt bikes until I left New Zealand. I went to Australia and then through the UK when I was in my 20s. Typical New Zealander doing your OE. Spent two years living in the UK. Did no motorsport through that period. And then actually, when I met my first wife, she had been involved in rallying before I was. And so she got us involved in it when we got back to New Zealand. Sure. And it was great. I mean, we probably had the best years of rallying in New Zealand. The roads we were able to use. So that got me way more involved in the industry. And so we've gone from there, yeah.

What about after your crash? Did you continue on after that?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

We've got to test the seats, obviously.

Yeah, yeah.

It was, and I had a couple of other big ones as well, but just rollovers and stuff, not over a cliff. But yeah, just to be able to get out of a race car after a crash is hugely important to us.

Right.

Our core value of the whole business is about getting drivers home. So that's very dear to me that we see drivers in a big crash and they get out and walk away. It's very important to us.

Well, let's talk about that then a little bit. This drag seat that you're developing now or coming to market with, what's it take to do that? Because usually when you make something lighter, it gets less strong. So that must be a huge hurdle to go over.

It is, and we've had a lot of experience now. So our first lightweight carbon seat we made for supercars in Australia back in 2003, 2004, we tested that seat, dynamically tested that seat to 25G rearward and 20G sideways. These new seats we're doing now are the same, very similar structure to that seat. So we're quite confident. I'm not gonna put a product on the market that's gonna hurt our brand in any way.

What does testing look like? Do you just belt in a sack of potatoes and throw it over a cliff? Or how does that work?

It's a bit more structured than that. So we have to find a crash sled somewhere. So the first one we used was in Melbourne in Australia. So they bolt our seat to a sled, put a crash test dummy into that sled, strapped in with a harness, and it sails off down and stops very quickly at the end. So they create a measured graph of what the load is that goes on to the seat. And the seat's not allowed to show any signs of cracking or delamination. And then in 2002, we got invited by Dodge to design a new seat for their Dodge Viper Comp Coupe. They didn't believe that there was any seat on the market at the time that was certified to an FIA standard and was safe enough for their customers. So they gave me a brief. They had Dr. John Melvin, who was a biomechanical engineer, that engaged him to design the cockpit of the car for the Comp Coupe. And he gave me the brief for the seat, which was, we still follow the same philosophy today that he told me back in 2002. So it's all about keeping the relationship between the various parts of the body in the same alignment. And he believes that the human body, if you do that properly, can handle 120, 130G hits without any injury. And then the other thing about it is you want to support the body on the shoulders, not on the ribs. So the shoulders got muscle and padding. The ribs are just little wee sticks with vital organs behind them, so you don't want too much around your ribs. And then the other really important thing is taking that load that you catch on the shoulders directly to the chassis. So the back fixing that we created back then is hugely critical in transferring the load from the upper torso straight to the chassis. So, and that's where the performance comes from too. So it's about, the safety is obviously a bit of a given, but the performance that a driver gets, as I said earlier, from being so part of the car because the seat is so rigid, that's what makes a massive difference here.

So, did you pick this up along the way? Who are some mentors you had in this? I mean, I'm sure you didn't know this from the get go. Was this a team of engineers? Advice from others?

Yeah, lots of advice from people like Dr. John Melvin. Working with some of the engineers at Dodge back in those days was really important to me. And then the FIA, because they'd seen what we did for the comp coup, the FIA got me involved to write the new standard, which is now the top standard in touring car racing. So we were kind of instrumental in helping them develop that and put it together. Quite interesting, really, they showed what we'd created to all of the other seat manufacturers at a meeting in Paris that I went to, and all the other manufacturers said, oh no, we can build a seat just with side-fixing, not without back-fixing. And so they were kind of rubbishing our requirement to have back-fixing. And until 2019, and there'd been some accidents where the floors had actually ripped out of the car because the load on the seat was so great. Wow. And so first of January 19, they mandated back-fixing of the seats in GT3 cars.

19 as in 2019?

Yeah.

Okay.

Which gave us a big step up because obviously we were the only manufacturer that had it. And so that's, I think, why we picked up some of the manufacturers we did.

So who was the first manufacturer at your work? I guess Dodge. Okay. And then how did it progress after that? Because did more people start coming on board over the years?

We got very involved in supercars in Australia.

Okay.

And unfortunately, this is a story that comes out quite a lot that to upgrade a safety standard in any form of motorsport takes some people dying unfortunately. So supercars had two drivers killed within a six month period. And both of them were side impacts. Both of them, if they'd been in our current seat, would still be alive. And so that made supercars realize they had to up their game. So they got us involved with our new seat. So that would have been 2008, 2009. But the other big step for us was probably Porsche. So Porsche approached us in 2015. And that's when they put the seat in their test car. And so we're now on the fourth project with Porsche. And obviously Porsche being such a prominent name in touring car racing and GT racing, it kind of lifted our brand as well. They've been fantastic to work with. They're quite happy to have dual branding on the seat. So Porsche and Racetech. The fact that Porsche chose Racetech to be in their works cars, made everybody look and go, wow, Racetech must actually be a good product. And then I think some of the other manufacturers have seen that. And the latest one with Toyota, that kind of came out of the blue a little bit. We didn't, we're still not really sure how they saw our product or why. But they've been fantastic to do it too. They had some very specific requirements for their seat. Okay. And we've been able to achieve that. We're a very responsive organization. So when you have a company like that come to us to design a seat, we do it very quickly. From initial design to a finished seat homologated, we can normally do within about a six week period, a six month period, which is a whole lot quicker than some of our competitors.

Yeah.

And there's quite a lot involved. It's machining a plug, making molds, designing the laminate. Yeah.

Can you explain real quick, so it's Porsche and Toyota, right? And again, specific details, but what are some examples of different criteria that one manufacturer would give you versus another?

So Porsche, they put our seat in the car. They liked it. They said, oh, we really love your seat, but we want to change it. And I said, well, how do you mean you want to change it? What's the problem with it? They said, well, our drivers are all very fit athletes. So it was just very small adjustments to the lat area in the seat. They just wanted a bit more space because the drivers, as I say, were very fit athletes. There were some very specific things about how they wanted the seat to fit into the car. So there were modifications we made to the shape and thickness of our seat in various parts just to fit what they wanted. Sure. Some of the other manufacturers use our standard products, Corvette, Aston and McLaren all just use a standard seat. Then Toyota had been testing with our seat, but had laid it back too far. And I said to them, it's not safe. The other thing they'd done was drilled lots of holes in it to get air flow through to cool the driver. So I said, look, we need to do this a different way. Bring the head back to vertical, the back of the seat needs to be vertical, behind the head. So that's why we came up with a specific seat for Toyota, for the GT3 car.

Do they give you a car, or do you just get CAD information, or how does that work?

Just CAD.

Yeah, okay.

And that first project with Porsche was quite amazing. We finalized the CAD design. We shipped the, well we sent the CAD model to the US, to a friend of mine in Moorsville, who machined the plug for us. We shipped the plug back to New Zealand, made the mold, shipped the prototype seat to Porsche, and it bolted into the car. I mean, CAD is quite amazing, what you can do with it, but it's not always everything. There's things you need to be able to look at in the real thing as well. So that prototype seat part of the process is really quite important to validate everything, to make sure that it's exactly what the customer wants.

Okay.

I was going to say earlier, this all sounds very cheap to do as well. Does that require an entire new wave of testing as well? Okay, so you can't just rely on the initial data from the previous seat. Okay.

So every time we do this process, there are more test houses now, but we still use the same one for the 862 standard. It's based in Milan. They've got a quasi-static test. The new standard is basically three tonne is pushed on the inside of the seat, and the seat's only allowed to deflect a certain amount. So yeah, the process is expensive. Machining a plug is quite an expensive part of the process. Finishing that, manufacturing the molds, and designing the laminate is all quite an involved process. And then the testing itself, just to give you an idea, the testing alone is probably a $30,000 exercise. Wow. And not always passed the first time. So we've had manufacturers, I won't name them, but we've had manufacturers who've had a big part of the design in the brackets. And I've kind of commented on that, and I said, I don't think it's strong enough. No, no, we're happy. So we've gone to the test house and it's failed horribly. So then we've come back and we've said, no, this is the way we believe the bracket needs to be. So it adds another cost, obviously, because you're going back and testing another product. But then we end up with a product we know is right for the job.

Sure.

What's the most advanced seat that you guys have made?

Yeah, probably these latest ones for Porsche and Toyota. We were the first company to develop a carbon fiber seat for sprint cars. So that was a long time ago now, 15 years ago. Oh, wow. Unfortunately, we'd made some progress in the US with sprint car seat. But then we had a bit of a disaster in 2013. We actually had a fire and lost our whole factory. So I had to focus on where we were making our profit. So we actually dropped the sprint car seat and we haven't come back. We still get inquiries for it now. People still want to have a sprint car seat because it was a very cool thing. But I think that these latest seats, especially this one for Toyota is a very special seat.

When did you guys start doing carbon fiber?

Back in 2003. Okay. It was quite a learning curve for us.

Yeah.

Changing from composite fiberglass to epoxy carbon fiber.

Was there a lot of retooling and equipment?

Yeah. Different tooling, different release agents. Crag and oven so we could cook the epoxy because the epoxy needs to be cooked to a certain process. We don't use an autoclave. We use a vacuum bagging and CNC oven.

Okay.

But it achieves what we want and we know we've got a good product. We don't use pre-pre-carbon. It's all wet lay hand lay. So the layup of the material is done by our craftsmen, like our very skilled guys who make a beautiful job of the product. In fact, the guys at Porsche thought that we're actually using pre-pre, because the weave on the back of the seat was so perfect. I said, no, this is all wet lay hand lay. And so they were quite impressed and very happy. They were happy to have a seat that was made by an artisan, so a craftsman, rather than just mass produced.

I was going to say, so yeah, basically every seat is hand made then.

Yep, absolutely. There's actually video on our website that actually shows the seats being made and how they're made. Big step forward after the fire, we moved into a new building and we put in two pieces of equipment that have really transformed our manufacturing as well. One was a CNC cutting table, so all of the materials are now cut on a CNC cutting table. The other thing was a robot. We have a robot that we bolt the seat into a jig. The robot trims the edges of the seat, cuts all the mounting holes, cuts the harness holes. Every seat is within a millimeter of where it should be.

Sorry, what was the other CNC machine that you mentioned a second ago?

CNC cutting table.

No, before that, I think it was a heating...

Oh, the oven.

Yeah, so what does that consist of?

Well, it's really about... The epoxy needs to be cooked at a certain ramp rate, so we ramp it up to a certain temperature, then it holds that temperature for a number of hours, and then turns off. So we normally do that overnight, so the guys will laminate the seats during the day, put them into the oven before they go home, come back in the morning and they've cooled down and they can take them out and de-mold them and go through the rest of the process.

How many seats can you get in there?

Three.

How many seats can you get in there?

Four.

Four, okay. Well, how long does it take to make a seat like that? Let's say one seat from start to finish.

So the high-end carbon fiber seats, about 40 hours per seat.

Oh wow.

The lesser fiberglass seats, 10 hours.

Okay.

So that's everything. So that's laminating it, trimming it, grooming it, sewing the cover, upholstering it, labeling it, packaging it.

Do you guys still do, do you do aluminum and stuff like that too? No. No? Okay.

No.

They want their people to live, Dan.

Yeah.

We've got a saying, you don't use an aluminum helmet, so why would you use an aluminum seat?

Fair enough.

I mean, it is, there are all sorts of benefits of a composite seat over an aluminum seat. Yes, there is some flex in the composite, but it comes back to where it was again. One of the downsides of aluminum is when it deflects, it stays there.

Oh, sure.

So if you're in a multiple rolling kind of incident or multiple impacts, then the chance of a seat may well have opened up in the first impact and then it's not there to catch you the second time. So that's when injuries can happen more.

I guess I haven't thought of that before. What about... I'll get to that question in a moment. But so one of the things I've talked to is some people are starting to become more, switching to drag racing world, I've seen that some people aren't comfortable getting a carbon fiber seat. It's been mentioned on our show before, but they ended up getting a Racetech anyway, but I think it was some other seat or whatever. Can you touch on exactly how safe carbon fiber seats are and why there might be a notion that they aren't?

I don't know why there'd be a notion they're not, but...

Again, sometimes Internet comments, you know how that goes.

So I think the issue is that somebody who doesn't know what they're doing and hasn't been through the experience we have with the testing and development of products. You know, if they just create a lightweight fiberglass seat and put it in a race car that hasn't been engineered properly, it's going to fail. And that's always been one of our concerns that somebody... You know, you can reverse engineer a composite seat quite easily. You take a seat and you take a mold off it. But our real IP is how we make the seat, what the laminate consists of, where it is. Just to give you an example, our high-end carbon seats have about 120 different pieces of reinforcement in the seat. We put material where we need the material to get the strength, and we don't have so many layers where we don't need it. So it is an engineered product, and obviously proven by testing. So we know the kind of loads that are going on to a seat. I mean, we still have accidents where seats are damaged because the impacts are great. And that's fine. The guy's still walked away. I mean, I can confidently say I know of no deaths in our 8862 seats since we've been making them. So we've been making those now since 2008, 2009. I know of none.

Sure. Is there an impact? So I would assume, just like they say, if you drop your helmet, you should replace it. Is there an impact speed or a certain cut off where you could get into some sort of accident and not have to replace your seat? Or do you recommend or where does?

Generally, you can see there's been an impact in the composite seat. You can see there's been a, with a carbon seat, there'll be around the fixing points. Normally, you'll see a discoloration. And so you can normally do a physical check and just not replace it. The seats are designed to a 70G impact. We know people have had bigger than 70G and the seat's been fine. But it's that kind of level. And most professional teams, if they know they've had a big impact, they'll replace the seat.

Okay.

At that point. Normally, the car's getting replaced as well, right?

Right, that's kind of what I was thinking. I was like, oh, if the car's already ruined, I'll just get a new seat in there anyway. What about you on a day-to-day level? Are you involved with some of the engineering? Are you more so acquiring more clientele? Everything, none of it? Where do you land?

All of the above.

Sure.

My expertise personally is probably the engineering side of it, and the shape, and listening to customers, and absorbing that, and being able to transfer that into our product. I come from a technical background, so I was actually a draftsman, so I actually drew plans for houses and stuff. But I also had built my own rally cars. So I taught myself how to weld, did all sorts of fabrication work, et cetera. So I've even built my own engines. So it's kind of a, there's a very technical stuff behind me. I'm also very good at this.

Sure, yeah.

You know, talking to customers, building relationships. This whole industry is about relationships, and I think I'm pretty good at doing that. It means it's pretty hard work, because you come to a show like this, and you're out until late building those relationships, right?

We know all about that. We were out a little too late last night.

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Yeah, PRI is definitely at the top of the list. We've done a number of other shows. We've done the odd show in Australia, auto sport show in the UK. We did a number of times but not very successful for us. PMW show in Germany. It was good at the time but I just walked that show a month ago. I mean, it's still a very high level technical show, but for us in the European market, it kind of doesn't help us very much. So this is definitely the show. We've tried SEMA. SEMA didn't really work for us.

You were there this year, right?

No, Adrian was walking it, but the last time we exhibited at SEMA was 2022. Okay. It just reaffirmed that this is the show.

Yeah. Well, it's more racer-oriented, right?

Absolutely. We've got a lot of dealers and customers who come and visit us every year at PRI. We get a lot of new customers from the show. We generally come away with some sort of a deal, like a new project or something that they come to us to supply the seats. It's right from when we first started. So we've been doing this for 25 years now, and it's definitely the best show for us in the world. Yeah.

Okay. Do you guys have anything or... So I think of things like Recaro, right? Where they make deals with OEMs to put them in, like a normal production car. Do you guys have any aspirations to do things like that? Are you sticking straight safety in race?

We've never... We've always focused on racing. We are working on a project right now with a small OEM that is building a GT race car, but to be able to homologate that car, they need to be able to build street cars as well. So we're looking now to develop a seat for a street car, for a sports car.

Hopefully, I have this. That would be really cool. Didn't the GTD and the Zero 1 also run Racetech seats at the ring or no? I misheard that. OK.

Lap record cars.

What's that?

Lap record cars.

The lap record cars? Lap record cars, yeah.

Sure.

OK. And then obviously, what's your overall market in the US? Is that mostly like Porsche Cup cars or where does it land?

All over. Sure. From rally cars, autocross, road racing, rallying. It's kind of everything. And now obviously drag racing. The other area we supply seats to occasionally is offshore power boats. Or we used to supply seats to jet sprint boats years ago. I mean, they're all going through the same sort of forces. We did a few different things for the offshore power boats. We put special gel padding under the buttocks so that they could be bouncing off the tops of waves and be able to absorb that injury without back injury. We do side by sides, seats for desert trucks.

Yeah, I think side by side in the video playing behind me at the patient. I think Patience Metal Fab also is, they put it in everything at this point.

So any of those your personal favorite? Anything you like to watch or do or participate in?

I mean, rally car, rallying is my background. So really cool. There's a car down here with our seats, rally car just down here with our seats in it. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, that is my passion, but I've learned more about GT and road racing since. And I would now attend more road racing events than anything else.

OK.

So we go to the Bathurst 1000 every year because we supply every seat to all the supercars and all the next tier down. I go to Le Mans every year because for the 24 hour race, we supply about half of the GT3 cars at that race. So it's good to be there for us to talk to our customers, to see what's happening, to see what challenges they're having, so we can take that on board to develop into the new products.

Which one's the most abusive?

I think probably off-road and desert racing and that stuff. I mean jumping off sand dunes and crazy stuff like that.

Again, how wide is your lineup? So outside of custom seats for various manufacturers, how many different seat offerings do you have?

Yeah, how many model numbers are there?

So really three ranges of seats. So we have the 4100, which we launched about three or four years ago, which is our entry level seat, which has both a seat with full containment and also seats without the head restraint. They've all still got the back mounting, which is still kind of unique for composite race seats. Then we have our biggest selling range at the moment would be our 119 range, which is same geometry as the 8862 seat, but it meets the lesser 8855 standard. Quite an economical seat for all the features in it. It's got cooling in the back still. It comes in four sizes, two materials, carbon and composite fiberglass. And then obviously the top range, the 129 range of seats which meet the 8862 standard, they come in both fiberglass and composite. We still are one of the few seat makers who make a fiberglass composite seat that meets the 8862 standard. So they're heavier, but they're obviously a lot more economical. So for some manufacturers who want to try and achieve a lower bomb, build a material cost, they put the fiberglass seat into the original car. And then if a customer wants to upgrade to the and save some weight, then they have the ability to bolt a carbon seat into the same brackets. Okay.

Interesting. Okay. What's the... Obviously, it's a big amount, but have you measured what the strength difference is between the normal composite and the carbon fiber?

So they have to meet the same test. So supposedly, they're the same strength. Sure. As I say, it's just heavier. So in a 129 seat, probably the difference in weight is 10 kilograms up to 14 kilograms. Wow. So it's a four kilogram difference. As a very rough rule, we say that a carbon seat is half the weight and twice the price.

Okay, sure.

How light is this new one that you guys are releasing to support the drag racing community?

12 pounds.

12 pounds as opposed to... What was it?

Yeah.

What was it? Because obviously, you're trying to break into that market before. What was the weight before that people weren't so happy with?

Not that much different. Only a few pounds extra probably in our carbon seat.

Yeah, but to a drag racer, that's everything, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we've supplied seats for the Cobra Jet drag car in... When was that? 21, I think. And that was a composite fiberglass seat. The guys are very particular about weight. So we saw something very innovative when we went to the Nationals here in Indy in August. A guy had actually cut out most of the fiberglass, left the front of the seat looking as if it was a real seat. This is the passenger seat. Yeah. But he cut the rest just to save some weight. So there was almost nothing there. It just looked like a seat. Right. Not ideal, but he wasn't going to put anyone in it. But that's how particular they are. And they... So we know that every pound counts.

Do you guys have any aspirations of moving into any other safety equipment, whether it be helmets or anything like that or expanding the lineup?

So we sell harnesses as well. So our harness is actually manufactured in the UK. Company that's been around forever. I knew the founder of the company. They're a nice product. It's made in England. We're comfortable that the quality is where it needs to be. Never had an issue with them. So that's a good mix, harness with a seat, is obviously when you're building a new car, you need both. In our New Zealand operation, we import a lot of other motorsport products that complement the seat. So if you're buying a race car, we're nearly a one stop shop. Here in the US, we tend to be far more focused just on the safety side of things. So we do seats, harnesses, roll cage padding, seat insert kits, but not a lot of other products.

What about you personally? Are you just a workaholic or do you do some racing still or?

Talk to my wife.

What would she say? How would she answer that question?

Workaholic, yeah. Never stop. It's just the nature of the business. Sure. Especially when you start opening up subsidiaries in different time zones around the world. So my day starts at 6 a.m. every day. I used to get up and watch the news and have some cup of coffee or whatever. Now, I just turn on my laptop and start work. Get to the office by half past 7. I normally am there until 6 at least. Come home after that and back on the computer again. Yeah. Because in the morning, I'm dealing with a US that's already awake, a few hours ahead of us. At night, I'm dealing with the UK and Europe who are just starting their days.

What's your biggest market?

US.

US?

Okay. So, a couple of years ago, the UK, Europe was getting very close to our US revenue, but a lot of that was the OEM manufacturers. So, US as a general product market is definitely our biggest market.

Okay. Then, you won't tell me a number. What's your number one selling seat?

It's the 4-1-1-9 HRW. So, it's our same geometry as the 8862 seat.

Okay.

Composite fiberglass. We just did a Black Friday sale for a couple of weeks, starting in the end of November, and that was our number one selling seat again.

Really?

Yeah.

Okay.

Material-wise, from my understanding, this new seat is also a completely different material than the previous carbon seat, or am I misunderstanding that?

Sorry.

Is it a different material than the other composite seat?

Yes, it is. So, the other composite seats all have the first layer as a Kevlar carbon fiber. Okay. But the feedback we got from the drag racing guys, they wanted pure carbon. There's not really any difference in weight. The material we use on that first layer, there's only 40 grams per square meter difference in mass. The carbon is a little bit lighter. But it's more about what the customer preferences. I believe there are some physical benefits of the Kevlar being in the first layer of the seat. It's a bit more flexible. The carbon can be quite brittle. But we're quite comfortable where the product is.

I always think when people talk about the strength of carbon fiber, they make wheels and brakes out of it. So it's gotta be pretty good.

Somebody said to me on Friday, when are you gonna start making carbon fiber brackets? We're not gonna make carbon fiber brackets. I still like the idea of an aluminum bracket or a steel bracket.

I imagine that's a diminishing return at that point as well.

I think race car guys, they would pay for anything if it's carbon.

One of the things that might have actually been Nick Placenek, who was a head of C.Sima, I think he was one. Actually, no, it was the other guy, his competitor. He's like, at a certain point, it's about $100 per pound to save weight in a car. So it obviously gets crazier to further up the chain you go, I imagine, but it's crazy what car guys will do just for a little bit of carbon.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're probably close to $1,000 a pound.

Right, yeah. To get really serious.

In fact, at really high level racing, $10,000 a kilo is not unheard of.

Sure.

So that's how serious the weight benefit is here.

What's the biggest series that you guys are involved in right now? Racing series.

Probably supercars in Australia would be.

Oh, wow, okay.

And it's been a great base for us. It's close to home. We've been able to learn from the guys, help them a lot with what we supply them. World endurance obviously is big for us because we are in 50% of GT cars. IMSA here in the US, same kind of percentage. So yeah, they would definitely be the biggest. Back in New Zealand, we have a Speedway series called Stock Cars, which they have the chassis around the outside of the car and it's full contact. So these guys are impacting each other and driving each other into concrete walls and stuff like that. We've designed specific seats for that category of racing.

That sounds like a race I need to watch. That sounds like fun.

Just look it up, New Zealand Stock Cars. Well, Super Stocks is actually the one race meeting a year. It's called the Super Stock Teams Championship. These guys hit hard. I mean, it's almost blood sport. They're out to kill each other. I'm serious. These guys will line somebody up at the end of the straight and drive them into the wall at 100 mile an hour. Oh my gosh.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I definitely need to check that out.

Yeah. Great proving ground for us. Right. These guys are having more impacts on one Saturday night than most people have in their whole racing career.

Yeah. Yeah.

So they're like live crash dummies. They can get out of the car and tell us where they're hurting, and I got knocked out, and so it's really been quite instrumental in helping us develop our product.

Oh, that's cool.

Sorry, I got to get over there.

We need to get over there, man. We need to go to New Zealand.

At some point, do we want to end up in that side of the world? I imagine at some point we'll do an Australia and New Zealand 10-day trip or something. We'll see what happens.

You need at least 10 days.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really, you need two to three weeks to see New Zealand, but I mean.

I didn't realize how long, so I looked into this. I was telling Adrian this, because one of our sponsors is, I don't know if you're familiar with Andre from the High Performance Academy, and they're in Queenstown, and then that's all the way, I mean, that's, I think, like eight hours or whatever from where you're at, and then if you go to the north side of the North Islands, another like 10 hours. I didn't realize how long the country was.

New Zealand is long. One of the benefits for New Zealanders, you can be surfing in the morning and you can be snow skiing in the afternoon.

Yeah.

It's kind of that close, right? I think we've got more permanent race tracks in New Zealand than any other country in the world per capita.

Oh, really?

Yeah. In some of them now are world class. So we have a guy who's been around the sport for a long time, successful businessman. He now owns three tracks in New Zealand. And he's transformed them into absolutely world class facilities.

I love to hear that.

Yeah.

It feels like nowadays, it's like the articles are so often, it's like a track shuts down or sold. But at the same time, you see a lot of tracks being bought up and improved. So, yeah, that's awesome to hear.

I mean, Tony's, Tony Quinn's his name. He's a racer himself still. But he's just fanatical about making sure the facility is somewhere nice for the family to come. Like, and he always has activities on outside the racing so that guys can bring their wives and kids along and they can be occupied while the husband's racing or whatever. It's, I mean, let's make it a family sport. And that's what I saw at the Nationals in August, was how family orientated the whole drag racing scene is. Yep.

When I go to the track, I bring my RV and my race trailer and the whole family comes with. The kids love hanging out at the track for the weekend.

So we got involved with Speedway Australia a couple of years ago where they came up with this program that they called Kids to Grids. And it was all about getting like 10 year old kids off their smartphones, in the car with mom and dad, going to a racetrack, racing in a car and going home again. So it was all about we sat down and had dinner one night with these guys and I said, what's the motivation here? What's this really all about? Getting kids off their flat screens. Yeah. I'm quite concerned where the sport's going. You know, there's obviously a bunch of young people around here, but I used to work in my garage with my mates on my race car. They'd come around two or three nights a week and every weekend, and we'd work on the car and have a few beers and lots of fun, comradery. The kids aren't doing that kind of stuff nowadays. And I think that's quite unfortunate for where the sport might go long-term.

Yeah. My oldest daughter is here and it's even harder for a female too. She's having very hard time connecting with somebody that is into that same kind of stuff. So even the boys now in her grade, they don't care. They don't know anything about cars. It's sad.

It is sad. So let's hope that changes. Yep. We get programs like this thing that Speedway Australia are doing. I mean, a fantastic initiative. And just get people talking to each other again instead of messaging each other.

Yes, I agree.

Well, that's my favorite part about doing this podcast. You sit down, put your phone down for an hour or two or whatever, and you get to actually really get to know someone. I feel like a lot of people have lost that. I mean, at the bar, we did not lose that last night, but you get to know people. But what are you most proud of in your career?

Saving people's lives.

Okay. That's a good answer.

As I said before, it's our core value in the business. Proud of building a team of people who have created world-class products. Very proud of what we've achieved with the brand. I think it could go to another level and Adrian is going to make that happen, right? So, to build a company from nothing to where it is now and to be a global product, supporting the sport globally, makes me very proud.

You guys have a number of how many lives you think you've saved?

How do you even quantify that?

Well, I mean, so that goes to a second part of the question then. Do you, if somebody is in a, there's a bad crash, let's say, do you ask for the seat back so you guys can do inspecting and things like that? I mean, not always if something bad happens, but just for R&D purposes?

So it depends which category you're involved in, really. As I was saying before, we're very close with supercars in Australia and they do crash. I'll normally contact the team if there is a big crash, just to find out how the driver is. Has he got any injuries? Where's he hurting? Try and figure out. They have crash recorders in the car so they can tell me what direction the impact was. We are concerned. If I see a driver have a big crash in one of our products, I want to know. The world endurance level and that professional level of sport, they don't tend to give us any feedback at all. They don't even give us any feedback about how good or bad the seat is. The general comment from the team leaders and the engineers is, if nobody's saying anything, everything's good.

Yeah, that works. So what's next for you? What is the next one, two, three, five years looks like? Any particular series you're trying to get into or how do you scale this even more?

I'd like to have the same sort of percentage in drag cars that we've got in GT racing.

Okay. 50 percent.

Yeah. It's a big ask, right? I mean, it's a big ask, but you got to start somewhere. I mean, we've been selling seats into drag cars for more than 20 years. Tim McCamus was one of the first adopters of our product. He's loved our product right from the start and seen the benefits of it. So that's been quite instrumental in helping us get into drag racing. But I think the effort that we're putting in now, the event attendance, talking to the drivers, showing that we care is very important, and I think that's going to take us to another level. The percentage of drag races that come to our booth is very, very high. Like I don't know, I'm going to say 75, 80% of the people who come on to our booth, drag races.

Yep.

That's what you heard from somebody yesterday. It might have been Dr. Jamie Meyer, actually. I think he was the one who was saying that, yeah, I think it's like around 80% of people here, some sort of straight line.

That's got to be pretty optimistic then.

We're very optimistic.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I, it's the word of mouth thing as well. Like we're, that's huge. We're hearing from people, they come on, oh, you make the best product. I mean, it's just the best in the world. And I was at a bar last night with some guys from the UK, and simple dough, you just make the best product. So I mean, that's really good to hear, obviously, but I've got a bit of an ego, but it's not that big. So I, you know, it's just great that people feel that way and it recognizes the effort that we put in and my team put in. I've got a bunch of people in my factory who care about what we do.

Yeah.

My design engineer is absolutely passionate about the fact we supply top level car manufacturers with our product and the fact that we design product in conjunction with them. So we collaborate with them. We work together like it's a very collaborative kind of thing at that level.

Okay.

And hopefully we can do the same with drag racing. If we can get close to the chassis builders and help them maybe modify their chassis a little bit, just so that it makes our seats easier to fit in. I mean, one of the benefits is surely got to be six bolts in the seats in the car, rather than a carbon shelf, port insert, head pads. You know, there's a whole lot more work in doing that than just putting a seat in the car.

Sure.

Do they have to use bolts that you supply or do you just say get this particular bolt?

No, no, that's probably where we're a little bit different too. So we supply bolts and washers for every fixing point. The bolts are high tensile cap screws we supply, M8 thread, the washers are 22mm diameter, 3mm thick steel. And because we've done all the testing, the only time I've ever seen a bolt fail was at a test house where they used a mild steel bolt instead of a high tensile bolt, sheared off. So then the seat fails, right? So you, it's crucially important, you're putting 3 tonne onto 6 bolts.

Yeah, you're not going to spend thousands of dollars on a seat and then go dig through the bolt bucket and bolt it into your car. Yeah, that's not a good idea.

I think of a guy that might.

Well, we personally know somebody that crashed a car at over 200 miles an hour and he had test him being alive to your seat. So we we've personally seen it.

So that's the other thing that gives me a lot of satisfaction. Yeah, you know, we're in a show like this and somebody will come up and say, you saved my life. Yeah, it's very, very satisfying to maybe it wasn't that bad, but they feel it's that bad.

Right.

You know, they walked away from a major crash. Yeah.

Well, it's also not even a matter of being alive, but also I mean, you don't exactly want broken ribs either. You know what I mean? What's the worst injury you've had?

Worst injury I've had?

Racing related.

Racing? Just that bruising really. I got more injured on my e-mountain bike when a car took me out on a cycle lane recently.

Oh, my.

So I was just riding my bike on a mountain bike. And this person came out of a gas station and didn't even look. I just went over the bonnet and...

Always something stupid like that, isn't it?

Yeah. What else have I? No, I've been very lucky. Yeah. And there is a lot of luck involved in this game too, right?

Oh, yeah.

Accidents happen and the other thing I've seen in motorsport crashes is, it's not normally just one thing that's happened. It's a whole combination of little incidents that have happened during that day, leading up to that crash. We had a guy who not sitting in our product or anything, but he had a start line crash where the first car on the grid stalled. He was on the back of the grid and he hit him and ended up as a quadriplegic. But it had started out way earlier in the day. He had two classic race cars. He had bought a Harns device that week. Harns' and one of the cars failed tech. They were out of date, so he swapped the belts from one car into the other and then swapped them back again, but didn't do the third loop through the triple bar adjuster. They reckon he was so late getting into the dummy grid, he didn't even have his helmet done up. Left the Harns' device in the truck. It was just a whole combination of same errors. Really quite a sad story. His wife actually wrote a letter to Motorsport New Zealand saying that he hasn't just destroyed his own life, he's destroyed the whole family's life because they now have to have living care in the house. Sometimes that's maybe worse than death. But yeah, it's a combination of things. So there's a whole, and it's like the safety package in a car. It's not just the seat. It's the seat, the belts, the hands, the device, the helmet, the suit, boots, gloves. It's the whole deal.

I lost my jacket one time and I was getting called to grid. I had to swing by the pro shop on my way to grid real quick, run in with my stuff on, buy a jacket real quick. That cost me 300 bucks and then I got back on. I got to grid on time. But yeah.

It's dumb.

Yeah. It's dumb s***.

People leave their underwear behind. Fireproof underwear. They don't... The number of people who wear just a T-shirt under their race suit and don't realize how much benefit a proper fireproof underwear set is. You know? And Bella Claver. I mean, we've seen guys caught fire in a car and I mean, they've been lucky they've had all the gear on, but they still get quite badly hurt. Yeah. Fire's a nasty thing too.

Well, we talked about this with Adrian in our podcast is a it's a very reactive thing. It's hard to be proactive. Actually and as we start to wrap up here, of course. I mean, how do you sell that ability to be proactive? I mean, that's got to be a difficult thing for you guys sometimes.

It is because we're trying to sell our product, obviously.

Well, naturally.

So people people see us if we're trying to promote an extra safety level or whatever, they are, but you're just selling your product. So it's always better to come from a third party or somebody who's had experience or whatever. So to have these customers that come to the booth talking to other people about how good our product is, that's that's probably an easier sell for us than us trying to sell it ourselves.

Have you guys ever, and maybe you've already done this, have you ever thought about doing a campaign of, let's say there's like 10 or 20 drivers that have had serious crashes, kind of doing like a testimonial sort of thing, like, hey, I'm, let me use John Dock as an example. I don't know what he's been through, but like, hi, I'm John Dock. Here's the incident I was in. And here's how the seat looked out of this crash or whatever.

Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's quite difficult to get testimonials from people. They don't always want to talk about it.

Of course.

But yeah, I mean, that's obviously important to us. And I think we've got a campaign that'll come up in the near future, where we do build on those testimonials. I mean, as I say, people come to our booth and say, thanks for saving my life. I think if we can capture a bit more of that probably and publicize that a bit more, I think that'll help us for sure too.

Yeah.

Yeah, that referral thing, it's the biggest thing in this industry. Like you could throw all the Google ads and Facebook ads out there you want, but nothing is more important than a referral.

Especially somebody who's tested the product to its limits, right?

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Really tested it. Well, as we wind down here, what do you respect the most in this industry?

Dr. John Melvin.

Okay.

The man who gave me the brief, the geometry of our seat, etc. I mean, he had done so much research into safety and was very involved in helping NASCAR develop their safety program. He'd put his whole life into helping people survive motorsport crashes. I always looked up to some of our competitors when we were first establishing. It was important. I mean, a big brand that I always looked up to is Recaro, obviously. They had done a fantastic job decades ago to build their brand and build the company. I think we've kind of taken their spot in GT racing now. We've obviously got a lot more cars using our product. We're not in the aircraft seating and the road car seating.

What about kids' car seats because they make those too. Yeah, they do.

The other thing we haven't touched on is we obviously developed a simulator when COVID came along. If people aren't racing, where are we going to sell racing seats? We developed a sim, which we did quite well with, but we've still got our sim seats. And our philosophy around that is that you should be sitting, if you're using it for driver training or learning tracks or whatever, you should be sitting in the same geometry seat that you have in your race car.

Okay.

So you're getting a... I mean, they're becoming so clever now, simulators, that you can change a setting in the car on a simulator, and that will translate exactly to what you're doing on the race car. So to be for a driver to be sitting in the same seat or the same geometry seat, it's hugely important going forward. So that's another side that's obviously still coming along.

Okay.

What's the oddest request you've had from a manufacturer for a custom criteria for a seat?

I'm not sure, but I guess...

Support in certain areas or anything like that?

Yeah, no, not really. We get some special requests from drivers who want some more rib support or whatever.

Yeah.

We kind of took them out of that pretty quickly because you don't want support here because as I said earlier, you've got little sticks and vital organs.

Oh, it'd be more of a direct impact sort of deal.

Um, strange requests. Size. So humans come in all different sizes, right?

What's the biggest seat you've done then?

So the biggest seat we've done is four inches wider than our biggest seats. Sure. And we have that ability with, um, with our composite fiberglass seats, we can make them much bigger.

Sure.

So we had several people on the booth already who have said that they, they need another inch or two inches in the seat. Well, we can do that.

Sure.

Okay. But that's, that's more for just a normal fiberglass, I think. It's not the carbon.

No, we can't do it with carbon.

Sure.

But we can do it with a composite fiberglass.

Okay. Understood.

Um, do you have a guideline on your website of like, how to measure yourself for your seat or?

Yes, we do. Um, we need to do a little bit more work on that.

Right.

But it's, um, it gives you a guide.

Right.

But a seat is still a very tactile product. I mean, it's important that your body fits it properly.

Right.

Um, that's part of the reason we, we still have to have a dealer network because it's important for dealers to have seats on display so that their customers can come in and sit in the seat and pick, pick exactly the right product for what they need. Yeah. Uh, yeah.

No, in that episode, it's playing right behind us at Patience. Again, I think they had four or five seats on display and they let me pick out which one to use for the podcast. They were like, maybe kind of a cool idea. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. I'll sit in the race seat. Uh, I was comfortable for, I think it was a full hour or 40 minutes. I discussed it in the episode actually. So, uh, from that perspective, it's great for podcasting too.

My office chair is a race seat. Is it really? Um, I actually developed a seat years ago for a friend of mine. He had a Subaru WRX as his, he was a traveling salesman. And it was before they really improved their seats. And we made him a seat specifically for his road car. And it was the most comfortable thing it ever sat in. Like, there's not much padding in them, but he was really, because of the shape, the geometry of the seat.

It's pretty easy for you to probably up the padding and all that stuff, too, if somebody wanted to, I imagine.

Yep.

And then you guys pretty much hand stitch everything and all that as well, right? Yeah.

So the only thing we don't do in our factory is the embroidery.

Oh, really?

So we cut the fabric on the CNC cutting table, which marks where the embroidery goes. We send those pieces of fabric out to an embroidery company. They come back, we stitch them into the covers.

Interesting.

Put them on, yeah.

Okay. Do you want to pop the usual three?

Yeah.

It's like this candle.

All right. So at the end of every episode, we like to ask our guests to pick three cars. I need a daily driver, a track car and a show car. You have an unlimited budget. You can build whatever you want.

You're probably going to need to ship your car soon or know somebody that will. And as someone who used to work in freight logistics, I understand the difficulties of finding reliable transport, especially when trying to make it to rallies, racetracks or to warehouse to hydro Corvette because you're going through a messy divorce and when she says everything, she means everything. Anywho, Nick Shearer is the proud owner of SureThing Logistics. Having traveled much of the country with every type of vehicle you can imagine, he's got the experience and reliability that you want to ensure a safe journey for your pride and joy. If you want to find out what it takes to ship your vehicle, go to surethinglogistics.net, fill out the intake form and be sure to let him know I sent you. Let's get back to the show.

Okay, so I love my daily driver. I've got an Audi SQ5, diesel, 3.0-liter biturbo, fast accelerating car, like lots of torque. Not really high speed, but very fast acceleration. My wife hates it.

They all love it though.

I'm not, it's quite funny. I'm not really a car guy. Like I, I don't change my car every couple of years. I've had my Audi now for six years. As far as a track car, yeah, I'm probably a Porsche. Okay. As far as a show car.

Oh, which Porsche?

Oh, a GT3 RS probably.

The latest and greatest?

Yeah. As far as a show car, well, I don't, some of these drag cars here are unbelievably beautiful cars. Actually, the one, Adrian saw it recently, Bentley drag car.

Oh, really?

Right? We were hoping to have it on our booth, but it wasn't going to happen logistically, but a beautiful car. Like this is a Bentley with a blower on it, and it's goldy orange, metallic.

What was that?

Okay. Oh, okay.

Okay. You have to show me a photo after, if you can find it. Okay, that's all three then. Is there anything else that we missed that you wanted to touch on real quick before we close out? I think we got all of it.

No, I think, hey, you guys were great. It's been a pleasure being here.

Yeah.

Thanks for listening. Hopefully it's helpful for your followers to understand where Racetech comes from, right?

Yeah, absolutely. On that note, where can everybody find you?

racetechusa.com. Here, we have a separate website for each market, but you can drop down. So if you go on one website, you can drop down to the other markets if you need to. Our home website is racetech.co.nz, which probably has the range of all of our other products we do in New Zealand. But here, yeah, racetechusa.com.

Awesome. You should make us some custom couches for next year. Dan, thanks for existing and we will thank you for coming on. David, this is a blast and we'll see you all next time.

Thank you.