Hundreds Of Products Ready Today. Dispatch/Collection Sit in the seat before you spend the money
Two bucket seats with the same published width can hold you completely differently. Book a slot, tell us the car and roughly what size you are, and we will have the likely shells off the racking for you to sit in.
The showroom is by appointment, Monday to Friday, 10.00am to 4.00pm. Visits are free and there is no obligation to buy anything on the day. Bring the car if you can.
What is on the floor
Four ranges, all of them out and sittable. The counts are what we list online, and a good slice of each range is here in the building.
01Motorsport seats
FIA 8855-1999 shells from Cobra, Sparco, OMP, Sabelt, Mirco and Bimarco. If your seat has run out of date and you need current homologation, this is the wall to stand in front of.
02Classic and historic
Cobra, Corbeau and Intatrim retro shapes for Beetles, Triumphs, Escorts and anything where a modern fibreglass bucket would look wrong. Mostly base mount and mostly trimmable in whatever you want.
03Reclining sport seats
Auto Style, Corbeau, Cobra, OMP and Sparco. The ones people buy when the OEM seat has given up but the back seats still need to be usable and the passenger still needs to get in.
04Road and race harnesses
Two full display walls, which is the part most people are not expecting. Everything from 2 inch TRS Clubman belts up to 6 point HANS compatible Sparco race harnesses, hanging where you can handle the hardware.
How an appointment works
Nothing formal about it. This is just the order things tend to happen in.
Book a slot
Pick a time at calendly.com/gsm-performance, or ring 0115 9893488 and we will put you in the diary. Tell us the car and what you are after. Tell us roughly what size you are as well, because that decides which shells come off the racking before you arrive.
Sit in everything
Get in each seat properly, in the same clothes you actually drive in. A suit and a hoodie fit very differently. Push against the shoulder bolsters, see where the belt slots land against your shoulders, and be honest about whether you can get out of it in a hurry.
Work out the mounting
Side mount or base mount decides which half of the catalogue you can even look at, and the fitting kit decides that, not the seat. We go through what exists for your car, whether it keeps the original belt buckle, and whether you can still get the seat low enough with a helmet on.
Leave with a package that fits together
Seat, subframe, sliders if you want them, and a harness that suits the mounting points you actually have. Buy on the day if you are happy, or take the list away and think about it. Nobody is going to chase you.
The single most useful thing you can do is park it outside. Door aperture, tunnel width and how much seat height you lose to the roof are all things we can measure in five minutes and argue about for an hour otherwise. It is also the fastest way to find out whether a wide shell will physically get through the door.
Getting the size right
The most common reason a seat comes back to us is size, and almost every one of those was bought without sitting in it.
Manufacturers publish a waist range and it is a rough guide at best. A Sparco shell tagged 32 to 36 and a Cobra shell tagged the same will not feel the same, because the bolster shape and the depth of the base differ. One holds you across the hips, the other holds you further up the ribs.
Height matters as much as waist and gets talked about less. If you are tall, the thing that catches you out is helmet clearance rather than legroom, and that only shows up once the seat is on its subframe and dropped into the car.
GT and XL versions are wider. That is the whole difference, and the naming catches people out every year. If you are slim and you buy the wide one because it sounds like the better one, you will move around in it, and holding you still is the entire job of a bucket seat.
If you are anywhere near the edge of a published range, come and sit in it. A seat you have to wriggle into on a cold morning is a seat you will stop using.
GSM PerformanceBrackets, rails and harnesses
The seat is the easy part. What holds it in is where the real decisions are.
We list over 1,500 fitting products, and which one you need is decided by your car and by whether the seat is side mount or base mount. Side mount seats bolt through the sides onto a subframe and sit low. Base mount seats bolt through the bottom. The two are not interchangeable and they take completely different kits, so it is worth settling that before you fall in love with a shell.
Sliders are the other thing to think about early. Fixed mounting gets the seat lower, which is what you want in a race car, and it also means anybody else who drives it is stuck with your position. If the car is shared or it is still a road car, runners are usually worth the extra few millimetres of height.
On harnesses, the mounting points you already have decide more than the belt does. A 6 point needs somewhere for the sub straps to go, and shoulder straps need to run within the angle the manufacturer specifies rather than wherever there happens to be a hole. Bring photographs of the floor and the rear bulkhead if you cannot bring the car.
FIA seats and harnesses carry a date and expire. A seat is valid for five years from its year of manufacture, extendable to a total of ten with the manufacturer, and harnesses run on their own dating. If you are buying for a championship, check what your regulations allow before you buy rather than after. We date-check anything you are unsure about while you are here.
Where we are and when we are open
Off the A46 in Nottinghamshire, which puts most of the UK within a couple of hours.
GSM Performance
Unit 5 and 6, High Hazles Road
Nottingham
NG12 3GZ
Visits are by appointment during those hours. If you are travelling any distance, book rather than turn up, because there are days when both of us are out on collections.
Common questions about visiting
Do I need an appointment?▾
Yes. The showroom runs by appointment Monday to Friday, 10.00am to 4.00pm. Tell us the car and your size when booking, and we will take the likely seats off the racking before you arrive. Book at calendly.com/gsm-performance or ring 0115 9893488.
How long should I allow?▾
An hour covers most visits. If you are picking a seat, a bracket and a harness together, or you are choosing for two people who are different sizes, allow closer to two.
Can I bring my car?▾
Please do. Measuring the actual door aperture and the transmission tunnel settles arguments that a spec sheet cannot, and it is the quickest way to find out whether a wide shell will physically go in.
Do you fit seats while I wait?▾
No. We are a supplier rather than a workshop, so we sort the seat, the subframe and the sliders, and we talk you or your fitter through the install. If you want the job done for you we can usually point you at someone local.
Is everything on the website in the showroom?▾
No, and nothing would fit if it were. We hold around 429 lines as showroom stock out of a catalogue in the thousands. Tell us what you are looking at before you travel and we will confirm what is physically here, or get it in for your appointment.
Can I buy on the day?▾
Yes, and most people do. Card, PayPal and Klarna all work in store the same way they do online, so you can spread the cost on a seat and harness package if you want to.
I am not sure what size I am. Can you help?▾
That is most of what the visit is for. Sitting in four seats in ten minutes tells you more than any waist measurement, because shells with the same published width hold you completely differently.
Where exactly are you?▾
Unit 5 and 6, High Hazles Road, Nottingham, NG12 3GZ. It is off the A46 in the Midlands, which puts most of the country within a couple of hours.
Book a slot and we will have the seats out ready
Tell us the car and roughly what size you are when you book. It costs nothing and there is no obligation, and it settles in an hour what otherwise takes a fortnight of photographs going back and forth.
Book an appointmentCall 0115 9893488Message us