1:24 TRS Racing Nascar Superlite 6-Point Harness (Silver)

Silver webbing for a neutrally tuned cockpit

Builders of racing cars sooner or later come across a car whose interior is deliberately without accents of color: bare carbon, the gray sheet of the cage and a seat with no cover. For such a cockpit a silver-gray strap is a more natural choice than a saturated color, which would draw attention to itself at a small scale. The Superlite type from TRS also has narrower webbing than classic six-point harnesses, so it suits a technically restrained setting visually as well.

The contents of the sheet are a complete bundle for one seat: a shoulder pair, a lap pair and two anti-submarine branches running to the central lock. The print is multi-layered and carries both the color and a raised texture, thanks to which the belt casts a small shadow of its own on a finished model. The buckles for adjusting the length are included in the artwork, so they do not have to be made up from foil or from photo-etch.

The procedure that works is to cut the individual straps out only just before laying them and to leave a minimum of carrier film at the edge. Longer branches are easier to place if you lead them from the anchor point on the shell toward the lock and keep straightening them as you go, so that no wave forms anywhere. Once it has dried completely it is a good idea to leave the surface unvarnished, because a matte overcoat would needlessly fill in the raised texture.

How the strap runs on the real car is worth attention too. The shoulder branches must not drop downward from the shoulders, otherwise they would compress the spine in an impact, and they therefore run horizontally or slightly upward to the crossbar of the cage behind the seat back. The lap section is anchored as low as possible at the hips and the last pair heads forward to the floor. When this geometry is kept on a model, the cockpit looks right even without anything further added.