Free gift unlocked
Gift box is in your basket at no charge.
How To Sit Lower In A Fiat Abarth 595
Fiat Abarth 595, seat height
A 595 is a tall little car and it seats you like one. The floor is high, the roof is not far above your head, and the standard seat is perched on its runners on top of all that. People who are perfectly comfortable in a Clio get into a 595 and feel like they are sitting on the car instead of in it.
Cameron takes this call most weeks. It almost always arrives as "which sports seat will drop me down", and the honest answer is that the seat is only half of it. What actually decides your height is how many parts end up stacked between the floor and your backside.
Garreth puts it less politely. Everyone shops for the seat and nobody shops for the runners, and the runners are the bit you are trying to get rid of.
- The factory runners are most of the height you are trying to lose
- A direct fit sub-frame replaces the runners, it does not sit on top of them
- A fixed back bucket bolted straight to the sub-frame is the lowest we can get you
- Most sport recliners land close to where the standard seat was, because the mechanism stays
- Corbeau make a low base version of the RRS and the VLS, which is the recliner exception
- Put a sliding runner back in and you put the height back in with it
- Width matters as much as height here. This is one of the smallest cabins we supply for
Why you sit so high in the first place
Nothing is wrong with the car. The 595 is built on a small, tall body, the floor sits where it sits, and the standard seat then goes on top of a pair of sliding runners so it can move fore and aft. Those runners are a mechanism, and a mechanism takes up space.
Stack it up and there are three separate things between you and the floorpan: the runners, the seat frame that sits on them, and the recline mechanism inside the seat. Take any of them out and you come down. Take all three out and you come down properly.
The three builds, drawn as an assembly order
Assembly order, not a scale drawing. The blocks are all the same size deliberately, because we do not publish a height figure for any of these parts. What the picture is for is counting what sits between you and the floor.
Why a sports recliner barely moves you
This is the part that disappoints people, so it is worth being straight about it. A sport recliner is still a reclining seat. It has a base, it has a recline mechanism, and both of those live underneath you exactly the way the standard ones do.
Swap the factory seat for a sport recliner on a direct fit sub-frame and you will gain a little, because the sub-frame is usually tidier than the factory runner assembly. You will not gain the amount the customer who rings up about headroom is hoping for. Cameron has had to say this on the phone more times than he would like.
There is one exception worth knowing about, and Corbeau make it.
The Corbeau low base, which is the recliner that does work
Corbeau build a low base version of two of their reclining seats. Same seat, shallower base underneath it, and our own listing is blunt about who it is for: worth it if you are tall, if you wear a helmet in the car, or if the roof is low. A 595 is the third one and quite often the first as well.
The Sportline RRS Low Base is £498.00 a seat and £984.00 for the pair. The VLS Low Base is £474.00 in leather and vinyl, or £426.00 in cloth. All of them are base mount, all of them recline, and all of them will still take a sliding runner if you need the seat to move.
Garreth reaches for these before anything else when the car is still somebody’s daily. You get most of the height back, you keep a seat you can drop the back on, and it stays a car two people can share without an argument.
-
From £498.00 Incl. VATPayPal CreditKlarna ReadySelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £474.00 Incl. VATPayPal CreditKlarna ReadySelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £426.00 Incl. VATPayPal CreditKlarna ReadySelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Corbeau are pairs only on most of the range, but not theseMost Corbeau main lines only come as a pair, so the price you see is for two seats. The RRS Low Base and the VLS are the exception and do have live singles, which is handy if you are only changing the driver’s side. The fourth card above is the RRS pair so you can see both prices next to each other.
The actual answer: a fixed back, and no runner under it
Take the runners out, put a direct fit sub-frame on the factory mounting points, and bolt a fixed back shell straight down onto it. One part between you and the floor instead of three. That is the whole trick and there is nothing clever about it.
What you give up is adjustment. A fixed back on a sub-frame with no runner does not move, so you set the position once at fitting and that is where you sit. In a car somebody else drives too, that is a real cost and not a detail.
A sliding runner puts the height straight backYou can add a runner under a sub-frame if the seat has to move, and on a side mounted shell the runner goes between the frame and the side mounts. It works and it is a normal road fitment. What it is not is a way of having both: the runner is a mechanism and it occupies the space you just freed up. One caveat if the car gets scrutineered, because a slider under an FIA homologated seat breaks the homologation for competition. On the road it is fine.
The two we would start with
Both of these are FIA 8855-1999, both are steel, and both take base mounts or side mounts, which matters because it means they bolt straight onto an Abarth sub-frame with nothing in between.
The Sparco Sprint is £252.00 and runs a steel shell where most competition seats at the money use fibreglass. It is heavier and it costs less, and it satisfies exactly the same scrutineer. The OMP TRS-E is £239.40, built on a tubular steel frame at 10.3kg, and it is one of the seats we sell most of. Both come in an L or XL cut if the standard shell is tight across the hips.
Cameron would put the Sprint on the OMP sub-frame and stop there. It is the cheapest way to the bottom of the car, it is homologated, and for a 595 that sees the odd track day it is enough seat. Garreth thinks that works right up until the day somebody else needs to drive it.
-
From £252.00 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £239.40 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Fibreglass, if you want the shape as well as the height
A moulded shell is lighter and it holds you differently. In a cabin this narrow the shape of the seat does as much for how the car feels as the last bit of base height does, which is Garreth’s argument for spending the extra here instead of on anything else.
The Sparco Rev QRT is £414.00 and cut for a 32 to 36 inch waist, all heights. The Evo QRT is £570.00 and is the narrower one, 28 to 32 inch waist and under six foot, with the Evo L at £612.00 for anyone broader. All three are side mount only, so the build is sub-frame, then universal side mounts, then the shell.
Cameron’s objection is the obvious one. The Evo is more than twice the Sprint and it is cut narrow, so it fixes one problem and can create another for a broader driver. He is not wrong, which is why the waist figure is in every listing.
Sparco list the Rev and the Evo twice, and one of them is not FIASearch our site for a Sparco Evo and you will find two listings that look almost identical. One is the FIA 8855-1999 motorsport seat. The other is the sim racing version of the same shell, rated for gaming and sim racing only, and our own product page says plainly that it is the wrong seat for a car that is going to be scrutineered. Check the approval line before you add to basket. The three cards above are all the FIA ones.
The frames that bolt into a 595
All four of these pick up the factory seat mounting points, so nothing gets cut or welded, and all four replace the standard runners instead of sitting on top of them.
Planted Technology is where we start on any car they cover, and they cover this one. SB099, £222.60 a side, a flat platform that will take a base mount seat, a runner or side mounts, so it does not commit you to one style before you have chosen the seat. They are made to order, so ask us for the current lead time rather than assuming it is on a shelf.
Then the brand frames. Sparco do a dedicated Abarth 595 sub-frame at £113.40, part 00499017-Abarth-595. Check that number, because it is a different frame to the 00499070 series used on the Fabia, Golf Mk6 and Ibiza. The 595 floor is its own shape. OMP’s HC871-Abarth is £127.64 and carries two bolt patterns instead of one. SW Motorsports do theirs at £138.00.
-
From £222.60 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £113.40 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £127.64 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £138.00 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Base mount seats swap between brands, with one exceptionSparco, OMP and Corbeau base mount seats all share the same bolt pattern, so a Sparco frame will happily carry an OMP or a Corbeau seat whatever the listing implies. Recaro is the genuine exception and runs its own spacing, which is why the OMP frame listing names Recaro separately. If you have a seat and a frame that do not line up, say so before you start drilling anything, because adaption bars exist.
Side mounts are the cheap part. Endurance Motorsport steel M8 side mounts are £34.80 and the multi point version, which gives you rows of holes to choose a height from, is £46.80.
-
From £34.80 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
-
From £46.80 Incl. VATPayPal CreditSelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Before any of that, measure the width
Height is the question people ask. Width is the one that stops the job. There is very little room between the door card and the transmission tunnel in a 500 shell, and a wide shell will not go in at any money.
Measure from the tunnel to the sill at the point where the seat base sits and send us the figure. That one number rules seats in and out faster than anything else on this page, and it is the reason the waist size is printed on every listing we sell.
- Tunnel to sill at the seat base, in millimetres
- Your height, and whether you wear a helmet in the car
- Your waist size, because every shell is cut to one
- Whether anyone else drives the car, which decides the runner question
- Whether it ever gets scrutineered, which decides the homologation question
What we would actually do
If the 595 is a weekend and track car and you are the only one who drives it, the answer is not complicated. OMP sub-frame, Sparco Sprint bolted straight to it, no runner. Under four hundred pounds a side and you are as low as this car goes.
If it is still the car that does the shopping, take the Corbeau low base. You lose some of the drop and you keep a seat that reclines and slides and that a second driver can live with. Garreth would take that trade on most 595s and Cameron would not, and the two of them have not settled it yet.
If you have the budget and a 32 inch waist, the Evo on side mounts is the nicest place to sit of anything here. It is also the most expensive way to discover that the cabin is narrow, so measure first.
Still weighing up recliners? Our five reclining seat choices for the Abarth 500 covers that side of it properly, including the fitting routes.
Common questions
How much lower will I actually sit?
We do not publish a millimetre figure for any of these brackets and we are not going to invent one. What we can tell you is what ends up in the stack: three parts under you as the car left the factory, one if you go to a fixed back on a sub-frame. Ring us with your height and we will talk you through what that means in your car.
Will a sports recliner drop me much?
Not much, no. The base and the recline mechanism are still underneath you. The Corbeau low base versions of the RRS and the VLS are the ones worth looking at if you want a recliner and you want the height, because the base itself is shallower.
Can I keep the seat sliding?
Yes, and plenty of people do. A runner goes under the sub-frame, or between the frame and the side mounts on a side mounted shell. Just be clear with yourself that the runner costs you height, because it is a mechanism like any other.
Does a slider affect the FIA approval?
For competition, yes. A slider under an FIA homologated seat breaks the homologation at scrutineering. For road use it makes no difference at all, so it comes down to what the car does.
Do I need Sparco seats to use the Sparco frame?
No. Base mount seats from Sparco, OMP and Corbeau share a bolt pattern and interchange on any of those frames. Recaro is the one that genuinely does not, because it uses its own spacing.
Which is the narrowest seat on this page?
The Sparco Evo QRT, cut for a 28 to 32 inch waist and drivers under six foot. That makes it the easiest one to get into a 500 shell and the one most likely to be tight if you are broader across the hips. The Evo L is the same seat with more room.
Is the steel Sprint worse than a fibreglass seat?
It is heavier and it costs less. It carries the same FIA 8855-1999 homologation and it passes the same scrutineer. If your series specifies a minimum seat weight or checks shell material, read the regulations first. For club use it is a sound seat.
Will these fit a standard Fiat 500 as well as the Abarth?
The frames are the thing to check, and there are separate listings for the 500 and the Abarth because the floors differ. Send us the registration and we will confirm which frame your car takes before you order.
💬
One measurement settles most of thisTunnel to sill, plus your height and waist
Send those three over and we will come back with the shells that physically go in your 595, the frame each one needs and what the lead times are looking like.
Need a personal recommendation?
We're here to ensure you pick the right seat.
Contact us today.