There are lots of suggestions re reducing the number of items carried in order to impove fuel consumtion.
Other ideas range from a personal diet to only half filling the washer bottle to carrying minimum fuel.
While I was reconfiguring the Focus for max load I needed to remove the rear head rests.
I was surprised to find that each weighed 1.2kg.
There has never been three passengers on the back seat and 99% of the time there are no rear passengers so IMO a minimum of 1.2kg weight saving can be made with a bonus of better rear vision.
I think the other 2.4kg can be saved for routine use.
Perhaps I sould remove the whole back seat? :-)
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Well if no rear passengers, then they won't need windows or doors either ! :)
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SWMBO often accuses me of being an "anorak" cos of the amount of time I am on this site. I assure her it is full of useful information!!
Please tell me you didn't take those head restraints out and put them on the kitchen scales to weigh??????
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Please tell me you didn't take those head restraints out and put them on the kitchen scales to weigh??????
The head restraints have to be totally removed to fold the seats down.
Tell SWMBO that I know our tortoise weighs 950gms cos he has to go on the kitchen scales twice a year and he is transported regularly so it is easy to recognise 250gm more ;-)
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I had a 205GTi car I used for trackdays. I removed all the sound deadening, wing mirrors, seats from the rear, rear trim, parcel shelf, audio system, passenger seats , spare wheel and carried marginal fuel. Timed on a sprint this knocked half a second from it's 0-100 time.
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Sabine Schmitz managed to do a lap of the Nurburgring in a Transit Van in something like 10 mins, 23 seconds. After stripping off anything unnecessary from the transit, she managed to get the lap time down to 10 mins 8 secs.
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"After stripping off anything unnecessary from the transit"
Don't forget that the "anything unnecessary" included The Hamster.
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Maybe going on a diet might be in order,and don`t carry loose change in your pockets.
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I practice the art of circular breathing so I don't carry any more air than is strictly necessary. That and a length of hose form a forced induction system of sorts to help the performace side of things too.
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Ah but Jeremy covered this - so that would have been worth at least 10 seconds !
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oooooh! a whole 1.2kg
As petrol has a specific gravity of 737 this is 1.6litres worth of petrol.
Why not always go round with a near empty fuel tank (popping into each petrol station as you pass one to top up with the minimum 2 litres). That way you can save yourself about 60 litres worth of fuel (about 44kg)
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There was a brilliant spoof article on these lines in SixAppeal, the magazine of the Triumph 2000 Register, a few years ago. It was poking gentle fun at one of the club stalwarts who re-manufactures components, and had recently had an article comparing the weights of things like exhaust mounting brackets and nuts and bolts that were needlessly long.
The article featured photographs of a car that was being progressively stripped of all unnecessary weight. (It was in fact of course being stripped for a major rebuild)
The best idea was to remove the fuel tank, which is quite heavy in itself, and have a gravity-fed supply from an old washing up bottle mounted above the engine.
It went on to describe removing the doors, all the glass, and then stripping the paint off. All the seats had gone of course, and the driver sat on a cut down plastic garden chair. Finally he removed the tyres, and drove to work along a railway track.
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A few years back a car dealer a know who used to specialise in unusual cars had a mini up for sale. It weas called 'swifty' and had featured in some motoring mags. The owner of the car had remade the front wings by hand in aluminium and replaced the side windows with perspex, all to save weight.
With kit cars the extra weight of a passenger makes a noticable difference to performance.
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