Sound the alarm, you've had a sense-of-humour-failure (ah well, it's only the first)

I dropped the car off with Steve Williams earlier this week (at last!). I felt some sense of consolation when he told me he tells customers it will take "two to three hours" to fit a race / bucket seat in an Elise. Most customers it seems, cannot hide their astonishment_quickly_turning_into_injustice at this figure - but trust me, 3 hours is childs play.

Rewind 48 hours: It's Sunday afternoon, we have some close firends coming over for a cuppa, and I'm stuck with my feet hanging out the driver-side footwell, trying to re-fit the Corbeau race seat I'd taken out the day prior. This is a job I expected to finish by 10am.
It *only* took me about 4 hours to take out the race seat, pax seat, clean the tub (and discover an empty packet of Marlboro lights in the process - not mine i hasten to add) and discover that the new seat setting I intended to try - one notch closer on the seat rails - was in fact far too close for comfort. Resetting the seat to the original setting, *all* I had to do on Sunday morning was bolt it back in. Simple right? Anyway, 5 hours later, a sore neck, shoulders and back, and an enormous hole inthe front of the car - where the windscreen used to be - now replaced with a Corbeau seat (joke) - and I've given up trying 55 different settings on the seat rail spacers and bolts and decided simply to refit the pax seat on the drivers side - after all, the first thing Steve will do on receiving the car will be to take the fecker out.

....So that's the nasty part. And the pic to the left is the goooooooooooooooood-times *bit* of today's post: it's my new roll cage (yay!). Note the extra low height of the horizontal harness bar: THIS is the offending item which has caused so much damned hassle. After much metaphorical "beard-stroking" Steve and I were both of the opinion that it wouldn't fit (OMG, pleeeeeeeease not again) as the harness bar - at least on the "3 and a half fingers" measurement technique appeared not to be high enough to clear the outcrop of the bulkhead behind the drivers seat to accomodate the fuel filler hose-to-fuel-tank. So, it came as a

not insignificant sense of relief when I got a voicemail message from Steve a mer 24 hours after dropping the car off saying "The A-frame is out and the rear section of the cage is in. And.................................(drum roll) it FITS" I a rather un-manly display of emotion I fist-pumped the air in my office - much to the chagrin of my colleagues. Hey-ho.

So...we are moving forwards. Steve is now well into the other jobs: fitting the remote thermostat, oil cooler, driveshaft oil seal, gearbox mount, easy-access battery charger, toelinks etc etc.

Also, I've found my trailer and will be picking it up shortly. Light twinkles at end of tunnel. A track with black tarmac may actually happen in March.............